chapter 4
Making Money on Facebook
Facebook is a great tool to use to engage your customers by sharing photos and comments. You can start conversations and glean valuable feedback from customers. This engagement is an indirect way that many businesses are making money on Facebook. Facebook can also be a powerful way to generate direct revenue for your product or service. By advertising on Facebook, you can reach hundreds, hundreds of thousands, or millions of potential customers.
Making money on Facebook is easy, but if you know some best practices, it’s much more profitable.
Reviewing Your Facebook Page Analytics
Selling Online Using Facebook
Selling online, whether through a website, blog, or e-mail newsletter, is pretty easy. You simply showcase your products, market them to your targeted customers, and then enable those customers to buy. Your customers can pay for your product or service through whatever method you choose, whether that is bringing you a pound of apples to your doorstep in exchange for 30 minutes of consulting, paying you through PayPal, or just mailing you a check. However, to maximize your online sales, you need to go beyond the basics and learn the art and science of selling online.
Using Facebook to sell online is no different than any of the other more typical methods. You simply list your products or services, wait for payments, and eke out a living. Or you can take it a step further and learn how to really maximize Facebook for your online sales and boost your e-commerce revenue. This chapter covers how to leverage Facebook to sell products or services online.
Creating a Facebook Page to make money
As I discuss in Chapter 3, your business should create a business Page rather than a group or personal profile Page. If you are using your personal Facebook profile as a business Page, don’t.
Before creating your Facebook Page for your business, ensure you have a personal Facebook profile that is fully set up. Use a great photo, fill out all the information, and carefully review and establish the privacy options you are comfortable with.
Business Pages enable multiple administrators. This is great for growing companies with turnover — you can rest assured that if an administrator leaves the company, someone else can still control the Page.
Business Pages are public by default, so they appear on search engine results.
Business Pages are divided into different categories, such as brand, local business, or musician, so they appear in more relevant search results.
With a personal profile, you are required to accept friendship requests. By contrast, anyone can become a fan of your business Page without administrator approval.
Brainstorming content ideas for your Facebook Page
Your Facebook Page is a great way to share content with your followers. The key is providing unique content that encourages followers to continue following your Page. Moreover, Facebook’s algorithm for determining which items appear in each user’s News Feed takes into account the frequency in which followers of a Page participate by clicking on that Page. This tracking ensures that Page content that is most often clicked on is considered among the top updates listed in News Feeds, where your followers will see it.
Here are some content ideas that you may want to consider for your Facebook Page:
• Pictures of your business at a trade show
• Photos of your business receiving an industry award
• Instructional videos about your product or service. For example, if your product is baked goods, you can post a video on good baking tips in the kitchen.
• Links to articles that your firm contributed to on a relevant site
• Acknowledgments of cherished clients for their contributions to an event
• Preview pictures for upcoming new products and services
• Announcements about upcoming guests on your podcast
• Announcements of upcoming webinars
Adding rich content to your Facebook Page bolsters engagement, and these ideas specifically reinforce the connection your customers and prospective customers have to buy from you again and again.
Using Facebook and Skype
Need to chat with the people who follow you, but don’t have enough time to go to their location? Skype and Facebook solved this challenge for you by introducing in-browser Skype integration in Facebook. This enhances your ability to send videos to Facebook friends and contacts and can open new doors of convenience for your business to share information faster and more conveniently. Initiating a call is straightforward. This feature is only available through the reader’s personal account (or if they’ve created a personal Page for their business). You can’t call anyone through your business Page.
To start, go to Facebook’s video calling start page (www.facebook.com/videocalling) and click Get Started (see Figure 4.1). A pop-up box appears in the lower-right corner of the screen asking you to select a friend to call from the people available in your online chat contacts. This is a quick one-time setup. Once the setup is complete, you’re ready to call any of your contacts in Facebook. If your contact isn’t online or available for a chat, you can always leave a video message for the contact to see later.
4.1 The Skype integration tool enables you to make video calls directly through Facebook.
To begin a video call, click the video camera icon in a chat window (see Figure 4.2). You can also click the settings button (gear icon) and then click Call in the top-right of your friend’s Facebook profile Page when that friend is online.
Facebook/Skype calling works in Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
The Skype integration includes some features that make chat easy and truly beneficial:
• The time and date of each call you make is listed in your ongoing message history with each friend. The calls themselves are not recorded or saved.
• You can continue using chat and other Facebook features during your video call.
• You can still use video calling even if you don’t have a webcam. You are able to see and hear your friends, but they are only able to hear you.
4.2 You can initiate a Skype video call directly from the Facebook chat window.
• You can make yourself unavailable for calls. To do so, follow these steps (see Figure 4.3):
1. Click the settings (gear) icon on the chat list.
2. Click Go Offline to no longer be available.
• If you want to block an individual or a group of individuals from calling or chatting with you, create a block list. To do this, click the settings (gear) icon in the bottom-right corner of the chat list and choose Advanced Settings. Here you can designate who can and who cannot see you. Additionally, anyone that you unfriend in Facebook is removed from your contact list.
4.3 You can go offline to make yourself unavailable for calls and chats.
You should consider using Skype chat as a way to connect with your clients and followers. You’ll find that the service can enhance your relationships by providing an additional means to communicate and follow up with people you have met in the field. You can also leave video messages for those people. Skype integration provides a new channel to communicate with customers, providing a way to make new sales possible. But do note that this only works if you have a personal profile.
Reviewing Your Facebook Page Analytics
Once you create your Facebook Page, it is very important that you regularly monitor the success of the Page. At the very basic, success can be measured by how many people like your Facebook Page, how many users are active, and what posts are most viewed. All these items can be reviewed through your Facebook Page analytics tools.
So to recap, creating your Facebook Page is one of the first steps to selling online. With your Facebook Page, you can post information about the products or services you are selling. You can use analytics to measure how your Page is doing, how effective your content is, and what products generate the most interest. I get more into analytics on Facebook (and in general) in Chapter 3, but I review Facebook’s algorithm next.
The Facebook algorithm
When you seek to improve engagement on Facebook, keep in mind the algorithm used to display posts. The algorithm on Facebook, influences how visible a shared post appears on a person’s News Feed. This is similar in concept to Google’s well-known PageRank algorithm, but it is applied to Facebook rather than Google and is different in the data it considers. A search engine algorithm focuses on the functional processes and design of a website, which can change, but such changes are processed by the algorithm over time. The number of referral links to a website is a factor in the PageRank algorithm, but those links must be picked up by search engines to be incorporated into its calculation (and these referral links can be influenced by other factors of a site).
On the other hand, the Facebook algorithm depends on human activity and newness of that activity. Thus, it is imperative for you to consider your ability to not only monitor Facebook data with more frequency than a web analytics tool, but also to consider the quality of your interactions with followers. The quality affects how your notifications are noticed among followers, which is essential if your intention is to draw people repeatedly to your Page.
Increases in affinity and weight increase your score within the algorithm, while older posts are seen as less valuable than new posts. Affinity is based on the exchange of likes, messages, links, Timeline posts, and comments. The more exchanges that occur around these functions, the better you can influence your rating within the algorithm.
There is no set formula or combination of posts and interactions. There are, however, steps you can take to develop a higher affinity and weight:
• Encourage people to like posts by asking directly. Energize your customers by asking them to participate on your fan Page.
• Post photos, videos, and slides with interesting content to encourage comments from those who respond to sight and sound, as well as provide variety.
• When posting to your site, rather than using a close-ended statement, format your post so that it asks an open-ended question and encourages your followers to interact. The algorithm will account for this interaction and how it exposes your post to a larger audience.
• Gain a sense of when your posts will most likely be seen. Some communication dashboard tools, such as Crowdbooster, suggest times based on past posts.
Insights
If you take the time to follow the steps that you think will increase your affinity and weight in the algorithm, you’ll surely want to know if it’s having any effect. You can do this by using analytic dashboards such as Facebook Insights. These dashboards are meant to help you manage your communication efforts. The Facebook Insights dashboard (shown in Figure 4.4) provides a single view of all your Facebook analytics related to the following properties:
• Websites that display and use Facebook social plug-ins, such as the Like button.
• Apps, including apps in testing, mobile device, and desktop apps.
• Facebook Pages, including Pages created on Facebook.com and those that are part of the Open Graph protocol, which allows third-party (such as websites and mobiles) connectivity to Faceboook.
As an example, you can view analytics about specific stories that people liked on your website, or how many people commented on your Page posts. This data tells you what your audience finds most interesting so that you can capitalize on that content.
4.4 Facebook Insights gives you great information on the performance of your Page and the interaction of your visitors.
On the Insights dashboard, you can see a variety of metrics and insight about the traffic (or users) visiting your Facebook Page. At the top of the Facebook Insights Page are four sections you can select: Overview, Likes, Reach, and Talking About This.
The Overview section gives you a quick snapshot of total likes, friends of friends (which is how many friends the people had who liked your Page), people talking about this (which is the number of people who interacted with your Page by posting to your Timeline, commenting or other actions), and weekly total reach (which shows you how many people have seen any content related to your Facebook Page).
One of the most important parts of the Overview section is that it shows you the posts in your Page and includes their reach, number of engaged users, number of users talking about this (talking, commenting, or otherwise engaged with a post), and the virality (the percentage of people who have engaged with your post versus someone who has just seen it and not engaged with it).
What I like doing with this section is sorting the posts by one of the metrics (reach, engaged users, talking about this, or virality) and seeing which posts received the highest rankings. This is important so that you know what content was most interesting (or valuable) to your audience. For example, one of my posts, which contained video, had a reach of 342 while a few other posts had reaches of less than 200. My audience (and probably yours, too) likes videos.
Clicking on the Likes section of the Facebook Insights dashboard shows you the gender and age, and countries, cities, and languages of the people who like your Page. You can also see from this area where your likes are coming from — from your Timeline or a Like box or Like button.
Reach is the next metric in Facebook Insights, and it gives you similar demographics to the Likes tab but related to not only who is liking your Page but also to who you are reaching. This section also includes insights in how people see your content. These methods include organic (such as who saw your content in a News Feed), paid (advertising), and viral (someone saw your content or Page through a friend). You can also see the total reach of all three of these methods.
The last section of the Facebook Insights tool is the Talking About This section, where you can see data related to users who are commenting, responding to questions, and other engagement with your Facebook Page. This data only appears if more than 30 people in seven days are talking about your Page.
You can select whether you want to see monthly or weekly data in the top-right corner of the Page. If you select monthly data, the dashboard automatically defaults to the last complete month. If you select weekly data, the dashboard automatically defaults to the last complete week. You can also choose to refine the date range.
Toward the top left of the Facebook Insights Page is a drop-down list with beginning and end dates (see Figure 4.5). If you click this menu, a date range selection appears where you can input the dates whose data you want to see (for example, November 3, 2012 – November 30, 2012).
If at any point you are unsure of what date range you’re looking at, you can hover your mouse pointer over the question mark next to the metric and see the options available.
Click Export Data at the top-right corner of the dashboard to export the data. A dialog box asks you to specify the date range for which you want to export data as well as whether you want to get the data as an Excel file or as a CSV (comma separated values) file.
4.5 Facebook breaks down your analytics so you can see specifics about your users and who is interacting with your Page.
Other analytic solutions
There are other analytic solutions available for Facebook that let social media teams focus their scarce time on creating great customer interactions rather than clicking from tool to tool. Many of these provide a means to download data into an Excel spreadsheet, and their range of analytic capabilities centers on communication. Keep in mind that, unlike Facebook Insights, these tools do not focus primarily on Facebook referral sources, thus their scope can differ slightly from what you are looking for. If you are interested in learning more about how the Like button contributes to your Page, Insights may be the more direct way to go. Yet others, like PageLever, provide the same metrics in a more graphic package.
Each of these analytic solutions offers diagnostic utilities that can help guide your social media steps, and all include Facebook Page integration. This is important if you are interested in comparing activity of Twitter versus Facebook, for example. Pricing varies on many of these tools, but most have either a free demo or a free trial. The following sections explain some of the available analytic tools available.
Hootsuite Pro
Hootsuite, the Twitter desktop application available at www.hootsuite.com, provides a dashboard that allows you to see Facebook and Google Analytics and Twitter analytics. Hootsuite enables you to customize the look and feel of this data to show as much or as little of it, from the various social networks, as you want. The analytics dashboard is part of its advanced version of Hootsuite Pro package, which has a low monthly fee.
Crowdbooster
Crowdbooster (www.crowdbooster.com) is a dashboard analytics solution normally used for monitoring Twitter engagement. It also provides measurement of engagement on Facebook Pages. In Crowdbooster, engagement is defined by the impressions of a message. Crowdbooster charts the number of impressions with the number of likes. This provides a graphic view of messages that have potentially gained the most reach and response, allowing you to consider eliminating messages that have no significance with followers. Crowdbooster also makes suggestions on which fans are commenting on your Page, thus suggesting who you should follow up with to strengthen your affinity and weight. The dashboard is simpler than most others like Hootsuite in that it does not have a daily breakdown of data and data downloads are not in the free version. The graphs and information provided can be immediately helpful to taking action on your fan Page.
PageLever
Introduced in 2011, PageLever (www.pagelever.com) provides a dashboard for managing multiple Facebook Pages. It breaks its dashboard metrics into three tiers: fan metrics, visibility, and engagement. It highlights key data, such as your Pages’ most responsive demographic. It also calculates percentages such as engagement rate, and displays a number of adjustable graphs. This tool provides an additional layer to metrics that appear in Facebook Insights and adds a number of interesting graphs and information. Referral sources, for example, indicate how visitors arrived to your fan Page.
Postling
Postling (www.postling.com) combines a number of share-across-platform features of Hootsuite and TweetDeck and adds delivery of comment summaries to your e-mail, blog post access from within the user interface, and an influence assessment of Twitter followers. With respect to Facebook, Postling can overlay visit data and provide an e-mail summary of your analytics. This platform is more suited for Twitter than Facebook, but it does provide an overview.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) is widely used by businesses large and small. As a business intelligence tool, it has helped websites understand their sources of traffic and helped businesses adjust their marketing, be it from search engine optimization, banner ads, pay-per-click ads, content marketing, or offline sources. But there is one specific challenge about its implementation that has plagued business owners with respect to Facebook.
To adjust for this segmentation challenge, Google has modified the solution to better complement how people are discovering sites online. Google introduced a social plug-in feature in version five of Google Analytics. The feature includes social engagement reports that measure how people share content on your site via social actions. Facebook Like button clicks are among these social actions, as well as Google +1 button clicks and Delicious bookmarks. The reports display measurement regarding three kinds of social media–related activity:
• A comparison of the number of Pages viewed per visit, average time on site, bounce rate, and other metrics for visits. This segments data between those who used social actions, which are available on your site, and those who did not.
• A comparison of the number of social actions (+1 clicks, likes, and so on) for each social source and social source–action combination.
• A comparison of the number of actions on each Page of your site with information displayed by social source or by social source–action combination.
The benefit for your business, particularly if a website is its main digital presence, is the capability to assess the effective social media channels worthy of increased investment of engagement and time.
Webtrends Social
Webtrends (www.webtrends.com) is well known for its enterprise-level web analytics. For small businesses, it has introduced Webtrends Social, a dashboard specific to Facebook. It provides a social media management platform to enable marketers to execute, manage, and improve their social media efforts across teams. On Webtrends Social, you can manage your Facebook Timeline, create shareable apps, delegate responses to team members, and analyze your successful efforts. The free version permits one Page, but multiple Pages can be managed for a low monthly fee.
Radian6
Need to listen to your brand? Monitoring brand mentions is the goal of Radian6 (www.radian6.com). Used by advertising agencies, Radian6 is an engagement console that tracks mentions of desired keywords across the web, including Twitter and Facebook. Radian6 provides a monthly subscription that is pricey for the smallest of businesses with the smallest amount of data. It is affordable for those who spend thousands per month on digital advertising. There are also a number of free resources from Radian6, which can be thought starters and are based on the developers’ experience.
Adobe Social
Introduced as a limited release beta in March 2011, Adobe Social (www.omniture.com/en/products/social/social_analytics) monitors and measures popular platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, and forums, so that valuable social data is analyzed in context with all online initiatives. This helps marketers gain answers to potentially correlated data, such as the peak of social sentiment mentions (which is about what people are saying about you in social media)versus peaks in website traffic (which indicates the raw traffic numbers to your website) Adobe Social provides additional analysis for elements of Facebook, such as fan demographics.
Advertising on Facebook
Marketing on Facebook, as you’ve read, delivers profitable results for your business in two ways: customer interaction and direct advertising. As you work to create advertising that works (it’s clicked on and liked) and content that is well received by your audience, keep in mind the exponential effect of Facebook. Not only are you reaching that initial person on Facebook, but through smart advertising and content engagement you are also reaching the friends of your fans. Say you have an audience of 500 fans. If 10 percent of this audience shares your content with their friends, you’re reaching 50 more people. If 10 percent of these folks share your content, you’re reaching 5 more people. If you get a higher percentage of interaction with your online audience and grow your fan base, your exponential (or multiplier) reach goes even higher.
Another option to effectively sell on Facebook is to use advertising. Facebook ads appear on individuals’ Facebook Pages in the right-hand advertising column and in the News Feed. Plus, they link to your Facebook Page or website, which hopefully leads people to purchase your product or service.
Advertising on Facebook is pretty simple and an effective way to do the following:
• Reach customers. Target the precise demographic of customers you want to reach.
• Deepen relationships with customers. By engaging customers where they spend a lot of their online time, on Facebook, you can engage customers in a variety of interesting ways.
• Save money. Big companies can spend lots of money buying a variety of advertisement types: TV, online, print, and so on. As a small-business owner with a small budget, you have few advertising options. Online advertising through Facebook is cost effective, and you only need to spend as much as you want. In this chapter, I have adapted Facebook’s effective and simple instructions, which you can access at www.facebook.com/business/ads (see Figure 4.6).
4.6 Facebook provides great tools to help you create ads and makes it a simple step-by-step process.
There are four main steps to create your ad:
1. Understand Facebook’s advertising policies and ad approval process.
2. Identify your goals.
3. Define who you want to reach with your ad.
4. Create your ad and set your budget.
Before you get started, it is useful to know there are two ways to purchase ads on Facebook:
• Contact Facebook’s sales team directly and work with them to find online advertising solutions. This tends to be for large brands with big budgets.
• Buy ads through Facebook’s self-serve tool.
The main focus in this book is the self-service tool. When you promote something you’ve created on Facebook, such as a Page or event, you have the opportunity to show social endorsements in your ad, making it more personally appealing and relevant to your audience.
For example, if you create a Facebook event for a sale or promotion, customers will be able to RSVP to your sale directly from your ad. If a viewer’s friend has engaged with the event the viewer will see “Jane Smith and 2 other friends are attending.” If someone likes your Facebook Page, a story appears in the News Feed, where his or her friends may also discover your business.
Identifying your goals
The first step to developing an excellent marketing campaign is defining what’s most important to you as a business owner. Do you want to increase sales? Generate awareness with a local audience? Promote a specific event? Or get more people to like your Facebook Page?
Your answers to these questions will help shape your goals for your ad campaign:
• What do you want to achieve with your ad?
• Do you want to build awareness of your company, products, services or Facebook Page? Here are some example goals for your campaign:
• Let people know your company or Facebook Page exists.
• Increase brand name recognition.
• Acquire new sales leads that you can follow up with later.
• Do you want to encourage specific actions on your website or on Facebook? If so, here are some example goals for your campaign:
• Get more people to like your Facebook Page.
• Get more people to visit your company’s website or online store.
• Increase sales by offering a special discount code for Facebook customers.
The most effective ad campaigns focus on just one goal at a time. For example, to encourage people to visit your store during sale season, you would create an event ad that asks people to RSVP to the sale. This is a very different ad than one you would create to drive traffic to an individual product landing page.
Defining your target customer
Before you launch your campaign, it’s important to think about the customers you have and the customers you want to reach in the future.
To identify your audience, ask yourself the following questions about your current customers:
• Who shops in your store, buys from your website, and tells friends about your company or Page today?
• Where are they located? Are they all over the world or in a particular geographic location? Or both?
• Do your customers fit into a specific age range or share an interest in a particular topic?
Creating your advertisement
Create your advertisement with care. Don’t rush to create an advertisement and think that sales will explode if you have not taken the time to carefully think about the customers you want to reach with your advertisement, as I explained earlier. The advertisement you create is one of the most important elements to selling online. For a minute, think about the offline advertisements you see throughout the day — hundreds of them — on TV, billboards, magazines, and store windows. Many of them you subliminally ignore, but there are a few, very few, that catch your eye. Facebook advertising is like this, but better. First of all, because you can specifically target your ad to the right profile, the chances of someone being interested in your advertisement are higher. It’s also important to be sure that the look and feel of your advertisement is appropriate. For example, there is no need to have a sexy model if you’re advertising children’s glasses, and you may want to talk about customer service if you’re advertising a car dealership.
Facebook has a variety of advertising types, depending on what you want to advertise: a Page, an event, an application on Facebook, or your own website. These ad types are determined when you first create your ad and when you choose the destination of your ad.
To start advertising on Facebook, go to www.facebook.com/advertising or click the Create an Ad link at the very bottom of your Facebook Page.
From here you can select what you want to advertise. This could be an external website address or a Facebook destination ID (such as a Page, app, or event).
You also have the choice to directly pick a Page or Place to advertise or an application or event. In this example, I am going to choose a Page.
You’re now presented with three options:
• Get More Page Likes. This helps you build a bigger audience.
• Promote Page Posts. This helps you get people to see and engage with a post that’s important.
• See Advanced Options. You can work on some more advanced advertising options such as cost per click.
For now, just focus on building a bigger audience for your existing Facebook Page.
Step one: Design your ad
Your ad is made up of a title, ad body copy, and an image (see Figure 4.7).
In this step you develop the headline and body of your advertisement, choose where people will land when they click on your advertisement (Timeline or photo), and upload an image.
• Title. Grab attention! You have 25 characters, including spaces, to capture people’s interest.
• Body. In 135 characters or less, describe the benefits of your product or service. If you want people to click through your ad to take specific action, be sure to call that out with simple, active language, like “Learn more now.”
A few tips to help you:
• The most successful ads on Facebook include images that are clear, easy to spot, and directly related to the content of your ad.
• When designing your ad, think about your advertising goals and how the ad can help support them. For example, if you’re looking to drive foot traffic to your business, use the ad title and ad body copy to tell your customers why they should visit your store.
• You see a preview of your ad as you create it, allowing you to make adjustments. The preview can save you time when you submit your ad for approval, enabling you to catch concerning errors before Facebook processes the ad and runs it. Take great care during this process, as it can lend heavily to the success or failure of your ad. Also, to avoid common pitfalls, review Facebook’s advertising guidelines at http://www.facebook.com/ad_ guidelines.php, which review the do’s and don’ts of advertising on Facebook.
4.7 The Facebook ad creation tool walks you through each of the steps needed to begin creating your ad.
To make your ad more successful, it’s important to target the ad to reach only the people who would find the ad copy most compelling. For example, say you own a yogurt shop. Your customers fall into three main groups: students from the local college, people who live within walking distance, and parents who drive across town to bring their kids to your family-friendly atmosphere. You could create three ads, each with slightly different goals, to target each of these groups.
In Figure 4.8, the ad on the left targets students, focusing on student discounts and late-night hours. The ad in the middle targets parents who live within the same city as your shop, mentioning special prices for children and playdates. The ad on the right targets people who might frequent the shop, promoting flavors of the week and new products.
4.8 You can create three different ads for the same product to target specific groups.
Step two: Use Sponsored Stories
Next you need to decide if you want to advertise using Sponsored Stories. Using Sponsored Stories helps friends of those who already like your business’s Page discover the Page you are advertising. You can remove Sponsored Stories (not use it) or keep the People liking your Page check box selected.
Step three: Select your audience
In this area you can select the geographic location in which your advertisement will run. If you are only focusing on building an audience for your Gilbert, Arizona donut shop, then just advertise to visitors who live near Gilbert, Arizona. When choosing your audience you can also select your audience by age and gender. Face it, a 13-year-old child is different than a 45-year-old adult. Precisely target your advertisement to the demographic that’s relevant. In this step you can also select broad interest categories of your audience based on what they do (their interests), their family status, the mobile device they use, and more. The last two advertising options in this step are important as well. Connections — do you want to advertise to everyone or just to those people connected to your Page? Or maybe you want to refine your advertising even more and only advertise to folks whose friends are connected to your Page.
As shown in Figure 4.9, you can target people based on specific characteristics.
4.9 Facebook allows you to be very specific in the demographic of who your ad will reach.
• Location. By city, state, province, zip code, or country. You must select at least one country.
• Demographics. By age range, gender, or a specific language, which is available under the See Advanced Targeting Options link. Within the advanced options you can also filter by gender, interest, and relationship.
• Likes and interests. What are your customers’ hobbies or passions? Unlike search advertising, where you target the words people search for, on Facebook you can target people by their interests. For example, if you sell cameras you could specify that you want your ad displayed to people interested in photography. You can add multiple likes and interests to reach a broader section of people.
• Education and work. You can direct your campaign to students in a specific college or people with a particular level of education by choosing this selection under the See Advanced Targeting Options link.
As you change your targeting preferences, note that the total number of people who might see your ad changes. For the most impact, it’s best to target your ad to a small, focused audience while making sure that the group is large enough to have a positive impact.
Step four: Name your campaign and set your pricing
After you complete the selections for targeting your ad, step 4 of the process is naming your campaign and establishing a budget (see Figure 4.10). This step is pretty straightforward. My recommendation is that you set a moderate daily campaign budget ($10–50 per day) and test your online advertisement. As you see it working, increase your advertising spend appropriately. If it’s not working the way you like, then adjust the campaign until you see the results you like.
A campaign is an ad or group of ads that share a daily budget and schedule. After you create your first ad, you can create more ads for the same campaign or create new campaigns. There are two types of campaigns that you can run:
• Cost per click (CPC). This is a type of campaign pricing where you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. This is the best type of campaign to use when you want to drive specific action on your website or Facebook Page.
• Cost per thousand impressions (CPM). In this type of campaign pricing, you pay based on the number of people who view your ad. This is the best type of campaign pricing to use to raise general awareness within a targeted audience.
Step five: Review and submit your ad
To preview your ad or review other details, click Review Ad at the bottom of the Campaigns, Pricing, and Scheduling page. If you need to change any of the details of the ad, click Edit Ad at the bottom of the page. You can change your title, body copy, image, or destination URL. When you’re satisfied with your ad, type your payment information and then click Place Order.
At this point, if you don’t already have a Facebook account, you’ll be guided through a process. You’ll use your Facebook account to manage the ad you’ve just created.
4.10 Creating your campaign name and budget is a very important step in ad creation.
Congratulations. You’ve created your very first advertisement on Facebook (or made a current one better). It’s also important that you manage your advertising budget and track your performance so you know if the advertisements are working and then work to improve your advertisements.
Determining cost and budgeting
There are many critical components in regard to advertising that you need to get right to ensure your Facebook advertisement is more than a pretty icon on a computer screen, and that it leads to sales. The amount you pay for your advertisement is important in determining the profitability of your advertising campaign. For example, if you pay $5 per click for an advertisement and get 10,000 clicks, your advertisement will cost $50,000. If only 100 of those who clicked bought a $10 item from you, then your revenue from the advertisement is $1,000. You are losing $49,000 on each set of ads. It is important that you measure your advertisement to know what is the best price to pay for it so you make the most profit per click.
Daily budget, daily spend limit, and lifetime budget
You have complete control over how much you spend daily. The ad budget that you set for a new campaign is your daily budget. It represents the maximum amount that you are willing to spend on that campaign each day you are advertising. Your ads automatically stop showing once your budget has been met for the day. You can change your daily campaign budget, or pause or delete your ads from within your Ads Manager at any time.
When you log in to Facebook, scroll to the bottom of the Page and click the advertising link to go to Faceboook’s campaign manager. I found it a bit hard to click this link as some Facebook Pages are very long. Another solution is to go to www.facebook.com/advertising and click the advertising link on the bottom of this Page.
Keep in mind that your daily budget is different from your daily spend limit. The daily spend limit is the limit Facebook sets to manage payments, and it automatically increases as you successfully make payments at previous limits. It’s similar to a credit rating. Available impressions are the number of impressions or views that your advertisement has available to it based on your targeting. Winning bids are the maximum cost per click you agree to pay, which affects how often your advertisements are shown. The limit is reset at midnight in your select time zone each day. Your daily spend limit increases automatically as you successfully make payments. However, you will never pay more than the sum of your maximum daily budgets.
Similar to your daily budget, your lifetime budget is the amount you are willing to spend over the full lifetime of your advertising campaign on Facebook. The total you spend on your Facebook ad campaign will not exceed this amount.
You may also change these settings in your Ads Manager after you set your ad live. You’ll notice the Duration is editable in your campaign settings. Each ad within a campaign is delivered based on these settings.
In the Facebook Ads Manager (which as of this writing is changing), click on the campaign you want to edit. At the top of the Page is a column for budget. Click the pen icon next to the dollar amount to display edit budget and schedule. Here you can edit the daily budget of your advertisement campaign and the campaign’s lifetime budget using the drop-down list. You can also edit the campaign schedule in this area as well.
Auction system
Facebook ads work on an auction-based bidding system, which means the market sets the price of your ad. When you set a maximum bid, you are saying that you are willing to pay up to that bid price per click or per thousand views of your ad.
Here’s how it works: Your max bid competes against other advertisers’ bids to determine which ad gets displayed to the target audience and how much you ultimately pay (up to your max bid, and never in excess of your daily budget).
If you’re trying to reach a highly desirable audience during a particularly popular part of the day, you are more likely to have to pay your maximum bid for each click or impression.
Facebook can help you select the right bid amount for your advertisement or you can make your own bid choices by selecting advanced mode (see the Advanced Mode link in the Campaigns, pricing and scheduling section of the advertisement-creation tool).
The suggested bid range shows you the range of bids that are currently winning the auction among ads similar to yours. It is recommended to set a bid price within or above the suggested pricing range provided for your ad. Your maximum bid is the most you’ll pay for a click on your ad or per thousand impressions delivered depending on whether you choose to pay per click (CPC) or per thousand impressions (CPM). Facebook only charges the amount that is required for your ad to win the auction, which may be lower than your maximum bid.
Test different messages and images
After running these ads for a while, you can start to refine the messaging, images, and offers to see what works best with each customer group. You may also start to branch out and try to reach new audiences.
The Like button in Facebook advertisements
Many Facebook ad types have a Like button. Like is a familiar action Facebook users use to attribute value to various objects on the site — photos, Timeline posts, status updates, and notes. By clicking Like, users express their sentiment about your business or organization and share this expression with their friends. When users like your business or organization, their friends can see that action in their version of the ad. The Like button only appears in your ad if you are promoting a Facebook object such as a Page, application, or event.
When you hover over an advertisement that is displaying in Facebook an X appears in the top right of the advertisement. When you click this advertisement you have two options: hide the advertisement or hide all advertisements related to this advertisement. The X is a way users can give Facebook quick and easy feedback on the ads they see. Facebook takes this feedback into account as it improves its advertising system for all advertisers and users.
Using the Facebook Ads Manager
Creating an advertisement on Facebook and properly targeting it is only half the work. The real work is measuring the effectiveness of your advertisement. Facebook’s Ads Manager is a powerful tool you can use to measure the effectiveness of your advertisement (see Figure 4.11).
4.11 Facebook Ads Manager monitors specific information about your campaigns so you can determine their success.
Facebook Ads Manager has three main displays that appear when you first examine a specific campaign:
• The Audience graph. This graph shows you how many people your ads reached compared to your total targeted audience in the last 28 days. To reach more of your potential audience, try raising your bids and budgets. Mouse over each circle to see the number of people included in each set. Hover over the question marks to see the definition of each metric.
• Response. Metrics help you understand the performance of your Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories, and how your audience has responded to your message. This data is updated constantly, so you can measure real-time results and quickly adapt your campaigns to be more successful.
• Ad management. When you click on an ad in your Ads Manager, the details for that ad appear within the table, so you never have to leave the Page.
Measuring advertising success
As with any advertising, you can use a variety of metrics to measure your Facebook ads. With Facebook, you can measure how many people your advertisement has the potential to reach based on your target audience. You can also review demographic results for your campaign and the number of people who saw your advertisement. This section looks at some ways to measure your audience.
The metrics in the Ads Manager can help you determine how well your ad campaign is doing. If you have used Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter, you are in luck — the details for running a CPC campaign in Facebook will be second nature with only a few differences.
Facebook ads operate a bit differently than most other cost-per-click ads. The most significant difference is the keyword algorithm that determines when an ad appears. Most cost-per-click networks base the appearance of their ads on the keywords the viewer uses in a search query. Thus, the mind-set of the visitor is based on eliminating a task, finding information, or resolving a certain problem. If your ad is for attracting customers looking for apples, then your ad has to cover apples as a keyword, be it Red Delicious or Edith Smith. When you first create your ad (www.facebook.com/advertising) or using the Ads Manager after your advertisement is created, you can edit keywords that people are interested in and that trigger whether your advertisement is seen. In Ads Manager, click on the campaign you want to edit. In the resulting screen, which has more details about the campaign, click on the campaign, and the screen opens up to provide more detailed editing options.
Facebook ads are targeted based on the likes and interests listed in users’ profiles. This means that ads are not shown from a search, but based on activity of the audience. Using the apple example (if you are not too hungry by now), a Facebook ad for your apples would display next to baking contests, cookouts, and recipe tips, rather than content or user profiles interested in ice hockey, watch collections, or scuba diving This makes Facebook ads a more interesting marketing tactic for your business — you have to consider how and why someone would use your offering. If you have constructed a good business model, you should be able to think of those events and plan to insert those keywords into your Facebook ad.
An impresssion is the number of times your ad is shown as an aggregate. Impressions are part of the calculation for the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and indicate the range in which the ad is shown in a network. In addition to impressions, other metrics to use in your analysis of ads (and Sponsored Stories) include the following:
• Clicks. The number of times someone clicks on the link provided in an ad.
• Click-through rate (CTR). This is the ratio of clicks to impressions.
• Price. The average amount you are paying per click (CPC) or per 1,000 impressions (CPM).
• Social CTR. The number of social clicks received divided by the number of social impressions.
• Social impressions. Impressions that were shown with the names of the viewer’s friends who liked your Page, RSVP’d to your event, or used your app. If you’re not advertising a Page, event, or app, you won’t see social data.
• Social reach. People who saw your ad with the names of their friends who liked your Page, RSVP’d to your event, or used your app. If you’re not advertising a Page, event, or app, your ad won’t have social reach.
• Social percentage. The percentage of impressions where your ad was shown with the names of the viewer’s friends who liked your Page, RSVP’d to your event, or used your app. If you’re not advertising a Page, event, or app, you won’t see social data.
• Spent. The amount you spent during the selected period.
• Targeted audience. The approximate number of people your ads or Sponsored Stories can reach based on your targeting. With 1 billion active users on Facebook, you can target the precise people who are most likely to be interested in your business or brand.
• Reach. The number of real people who saw your ads or Sponsored Stories. Facebook makes it easy for businesses to talk to real people through highly targeted ads and Sponsored Stories. Reach is different than impressions, which include people viewing an ad multiple times.
• Frequency. The average number of times people saw your ad.
• Connections. The number of people who liked your Facebook Page, RSVP’d to your event, or installed your app within 24 hours of seeing an ad. If you’re not advertising a Page, event, or app, you won’t see Connections data.
Ad performance reporting in Ads Manager
There are three summary reports that capture the aforementioned metrics. These reports can be exported to an Excel sheet, which is perfect if you have an advanced analytics team importing data into a custom dashboard. Reports can be e-mailed to you if you need just a periodic summary. You can select the duration, the period for your campaign. Your choices include Last 7 days, Today, Yesterday, Last 28 days, and custom duration for specific time lengths. Each report can be displayed by campaign, ad, or even Pages if your social media team is managing a multiple Pages.
On the left side of the Ads Manager, click in reports. Then select the parameters of your report type and click the Generate Report button.
These are the five reports:
• Advertising Performance. This report covers impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and spend.
• Responder Demographic. This report provides valuable demographic information about users who see and click on your ads. After reviewing this report, you will be better able to optimize your filters for targeting your audience.
• Actions by Impressions Time. This report shows the number of conversions on your Page over time (that is, 0–24 hours, 1–7 days, or 8–28 days).
• Inline Interactions. If user engagement is very important to you, this report gives you insight into the performance of ads or Sponsored Stories for Page posts.
• News Feed. This report shows how Sponsored Stories perform in the News Feed, including the average position within the feed where the story was inserted.
First ad analysis steps
First, establish a baseline performance for your ads. This is particularly useful if you plan to run ads on occasion for your business, promotion, or Page. Gaining a sense of how well your ad does in an initial run can indicate what improvements or changes to the ads are necessary.
You can then use that baseline information to test different aspects of the ad that increase a metric of interest. Maybe you need a higher CTR for a particular region or demographic. Having a baseline and then running a test can help you focus your next efforts.
You can compare the CPC and CPM data from your ads. The one that registered the lowest among these metrics provides the best cost performance for clicks and impressions shown. But you can get more specific than this. Use each of these reports to gain some segmentation perspective of your ad by time. For example, maybe women are more active users of your Facebook Page at night. Maybe 20-year-old males interested in animals are more active users of your Page in the morning. Advertising is great, but being able to segment your audience by demographics and their interaction with your Facebook Page is critical.
The Ads Manager provides ways to match your ad performance with demographics that complement your business model. Through responder demographics, you can develop answers to the following questions:
• Which segments give the best CTR? It is possible that some demographics are responding to your ads better than others?
• Is the response for the demographic better or worse than you had expected? If you created a baseline, you can see if the ad run at full tilt performed as expected. This is particularly helpful when testing one ad combination versus another.
One mistake some businesses make with cost-per-click ads is to run them continuously in the same manner that an ad typically appears in a newspaper. CPC ads can certainly be run that way, but they are meant for more targeted audiences. This is especially true in light of how Facebook displays ads. Running continuously without periodic review can waste advertising budget. You have a rare opportunity to be more targeted with Facebook, so take advantage of it! If you have a constrained ad budget, consider cost-per-click and cost-per-impression advertising as a “turbo boost” to your Facebook presence or overall digital marketing plan.
Remember that images may be unique to Facebook ads over other CPC ads, but so is image fatigue. Images can play a factor in a Facebook user’s decision to click on an ad. The viewer of your ad will have spent a lot of time on Facebook — Mashable reported in 2010 that the average Facebook user spends more than seven hours daily on the social network. So chances are they may see your ad repeatedly throughout the time the ad runs. This can mean a number of impression opportunities for the ad to be memorable, but it also means those same people can end up feeling that they have seen the ad too much if the ad picture does not change.
Also keep in mind that a landing page is still valuable for a Facebook ad, just like a CPC or banner ad. (A landing page is a web page on which your customers arrive when they click on the ad.) Your ads are a lead in for the action you want customers to do on the landing page.
Many businesses link their ads directly to their websites. That is not the best practice in a number of cases, particularly when a web page can have multiple pieces of information that can make a call to action too confusing. E-commerce sites and blogs can have this problem. A landing page has content that is directly related to your ad. Make sure there are no pop-up pages that occur when someone lands on your landing page. If the landing page is a gateway to your site, make sure its appearance matches or mimics your main website for a coherent look.
Remember that you can budget for Facebook ads and a CPC ad in another network. That may sound super basic but can be worthwhile to give two different avenues for having your business discovered. Likes and interests are different than a search query, and most importantly, the purpose for an ad is to make your business, product, service, or event discoverable.
A Page, event, or app allows people to connect with your business in many ways throughout Facebook. Ads help create awareness of your business’ Facebook presence. Connections tells you how many people connected with your business after seeing your ads, even if they didn’t click, so you know you’re driving results.
As you can see, there is a lot of data you can view and analyze in regard to your Facebook advertisement. Maybe you don’t have time to manage your advertisement, but ensure that someone does. Consider the frequency of your ad campaign to evaluate whether you are broadcasting your message with the right intensity or need to make changes to your marketing strategy. The only thing worse than advertising is investing the money to advertise and not taking the time to measure the effectiveness of that advertising to improve it.
Using Sponsored Stories
Facebook has a variety of methods you can use to market your business to new customers and engage existing customers. Beyond paid advertising and creating an engaging Page with content, Sponsored Stories takes the natural interaction someone makes on your Page or application and promotes this on the right column of their friends’ Facebook Page (see Figure 4.12) or News Feed.
Why is this important? Normally when someone interacts with your brand on Facebook that interaction is placed on their friends’ News Feeds. However, those stories are usually only seen if they are visible to users at the time they are on Facebook. Over time, new stories appear on top, pushing down older ones. Sponsored Stories solve this problem by making your users’ interactions more visible. Choosing to run a Sponsored Story along with your ad campaign optimizes your marketing reach. You do not, however, have to run them together and can run just one or the other.
There are seven types of Sponsored Stories. Select the right one for you based on your goals and the source of the stories you want to amplify: your Facebook Page, Facebook place (for customers to check in), your website, or Facebook app.
4.12 Sponsored Stories appear in the right-hand column of a Facebook user’s home page and in the News Feed.
Here are some examples:
• Acquire more fans. Let others know that their friends are liking your Page.
• Engage with more of your fans. Show your posts to a wider audience.
• Drive in-store traffic. Let others know when their friends check in to your location.
• Increase app engagement. Let others know who is using or sharing your app or game.
Creating a Sponsored Story
To create a Sponsored Story, you follow many of the same steps as you do when creating an ad:
1. To create a Sponsored Story, go to www.facebook.com/advertising and click Create an Ad. You must log into Facebook if you are not already logged in.
2. Select what you want to advertise from the list: either a Facebook destination (your Page) or an external URL.
3. Click Promote Page Posts in the “What would you like to do” section of the advertising creation page.
4. Choose the post on your Page you wish to promote (see Figure 4.13). You can also set this so Facebook automatically promotes the most recent post, as opposed to you manually selecting one particular post to promote.
a. If you click Show Advanced Options, you’ll be presented with an option to add tracking tags to URLs included in your promoted posts. Tracking tags are used to better track the effectiveness of your promoted posts campaign.
5. Select how your promoted posts are shown in Sponsored Stories. Your promoted posts can be shown to the friends of people who
a. like your Page post
b. comment on your Page post
c. share your Page post
6. Choose your audience. You can specify a geographic location by zip code, state, or country. You can also specify age range, gender, precise interests, and overall broad categories of the person who should be shown your promoted post.
The Connections options is very powerful and allows you to granularly show your promoted posts only to people who have a certain connection to your Page or post. Click See Advanced Targeting Options to see even more detailed selection options.
7. Set your campaign name, price, and schedule. Feel free to refer to the overall advertising steps for fuller details on this stage.
4.13 Sponsored Stories are another way to advertise your business and are very easy to set up.
8. Click Review Ad.
9. When you are finished reviewing your ad, click Place Order.
If you’ve already set up your ad and wish to change it, you can simply go into the Ads manager to pause or delete your ad and then re-create a Sponsored Story campaign.
Setting up your budget and targeting criteria
Sponsored Stories are only seen by friends of people who engage with your Facebook Page. Using the traditional advertising targets, you can further segment who you reach with parameters such as location and gender. Setting the budget for a Sponsored Story is very similar to doing it for any other advertisement. As you select bids, don’t select them too low or your advertisements won’t show. Set them within or above the suggested ranges.
Generating more stories about your business
Sponsored Stories are very powerful and are a great way for your audience members to tell their friends about your business. To make Sponsored Stories as effective as possible, make sure you do things that cause your audience to take action, such as the following:
• To build interest in people liking your Page, purchase Facebook advertisements. Bolster your campaign by using Page Like Stories to amplify these actions on Facebook.
• Make sure you don’t leave your website out of the mix. Encourage your website visitors to like your website and send a link to their friends using Facebook’s variety of social plug-ins. You can also amplify these actions with Sponsored Stories.
In summary, Sponsored Stories provide a layer on top of your Facebook advertising effort. If you find your traditional Facebook advertising a success, Sponsored Stories can help your brand (or product or service) build much deeper engagement with your audience and the friends of your audience.
There is also an app made by Wildfire called Storyteller, which is meant to add additional nuance to Sponsored Stories. The Storyteller app is designed to turn user feedback and opinions into not just News Feed stories but also Sponsored Stories. You can add an app link to your Facebook Pages, on which you ask fans to answer a question or provide an opinion. Users can then share those answers with their Facebook friends and post it on their Timelines or have the comments appear as a Sponsored Story on their Facebook Pages.