Facebook Ads Revamped for Small Businesses: we all want to be liked

We all love a tryer.  Facebook have tried previously with their earlier version of ad units to help small businesses advertise on Facebook (The New Instagram:), but now have adopted a new strategy and a simpler offering for ad placements.  So how does this work?

Well, there are 3 ways of advertising on Facebook now. These ads that can be configured around your needs and objectives according to Facebook’s presentational opening screen. You can get more page likes to grow your audience, promote your page posts to improve engagement and get your content seen more readily or there’s an advanced option for more flexible bidding.

With the ‘Get More Page Likes’  option, you have what Facebook call a ‘Landing View’ – basically you get to choose which part of Facebook you want to lead your customers once the ad is clicked. You can opt to take people to your timeline, events or any specific app you have created. This is useful and can allow you to do some split testing on different facebook app landing pages.

There’s also an option to display your advert on sponsored stories within news feeds (which is turned on by default, but can be removed).  These adverts don’t appear on the right hand side, but are marked Sponsored within the news feed, although in small writing, so as to be not that obvious to the glancing visitor in a watered down light grey colour. But where will it appear? What is the added benefit? Simply, your post will appear higher up the news feed giving more exposure compared to normal posts that historically get pushed down the page. The ability to now promote Page Posts is a new feature and gives you the opportunity to enhance even further posts that have not received enough exposure or give that extra push to other neglected posts, like competitions or industry posts.

There are some useful advertising options for targeting more precisely for custom interests and sub-categories. You can also target certain types of people based on how they are connected to you.  This is handy to exclude advertising and targeting people who are already aware of your brand or facebook page , if you are targeting for likes that is.   You can also narrow down the targeting further to target peoples who’s  friends are connected to one of your apps, pages or events.  This would be useful if you are wanting to make most of the 1 to many relationship and penetrate your message to fit a specific audience interest.

And, there’s more! There is an advanced targeting option allowing you to opt for “Target people who are connected to” or  “Target people who are not connected to”

There are many small businesses that need that kick start or extra velocity to make some ground on Facebook.  But remember facebook social is not a search platform where people search for products or services, (that may come in the future),   it’s a social place to hang out and it doesn’t lend itself for gaining huge amounts of leads or conducive to an aggressive sales strategy, but can help you make local connections with other businesses and build your brand effectively.

The combination of Facebook’s visibility, brand strength and newly simplified tools may turn into a big success story for them in local in 2013.