Facebook is one of the newest and coolest advertising mediums available today for marketers. It is the best platform yet to make your services and products known to a very wide target audience. However, advertising on Facebook can be tough especially for first timers. While you could be an expert in advertising on other mediums, it can still prove very tough when doing it on Facebook because of the simple reason that it is a social media platform.
In other words, you cannot use the same approach you use when advertising using PPC with Google or banner ads on your website through affiliate marketing. It is a very different form of advertisement in the simple fact that the target audiences have a totally different mindset. The main reason is because people get to Facebook to interact, connect, network, communicate, share, and above all else have fun by socializing. Facebook users will rarely come to Facebook in search of information or to do any sort of research (that is the work of the search engines), they come to Facebook to look for people.
The first natural course of action therefore would be to determine who your target audience is. What category do you think most of your target audiences are in? Are your target audiences male or female? Do they like to read a lot, if yes, what topics do they like to read about? Who are your target audiences’ friends? What types of fan pages are they in? The moment you get answers to all these questions, you can be able to base your Facebook marketing strategy on the answers you get. It is to be mentioned that for a first timer, doing this can be very tricky, daunting and time consuming but with little practice and experience, it will be a matter of time before you become an expert.
Say for instance you are an affiliate marketer promoting weight loss related products, Facebook allows you to target individuals who are interested in what you have to offer. Say you deal with home businesses; you could target individuals who are currently fans of other groups related to home businesses. Facebook really has made things very easy for internet marketers because when you key in a specific keyword related to the market that you are targeting, you can be able to get a statistical view of the number of people who are already in Facebook and who could be interested in the target market.
In other words, if you key in weight loss in the search box, Facebook will give you results of the number of its members who could be interested in the topic or who are part of some kind of fan page related to the weight loss niche. Take your time to play around in Facebook and with the different applications available and you can learn how it works and how it can be beneficial to your business.
