Over the past few years, Facebook has established itself as the world’s largest social network, turned out to be larger than a lot of countries too. And that’s one major reason it has become every small business’ first point of call whenever advertising is mentioned. Needless to say, it has proved effective for a lot of brands, the ones who know how to use it. But the problem is, not everyone is well grounded in the big idea of advertising, or how marketing campaigns should work in the first place. That’s the purpose of this post, to get you aquatinted with what Facebook advertising is all about, and how you can take advantage of it.

What is Facebook advertising?

A no-brainer huh? If you think you get the idea, you can skip to the next sub-topic.
Still here? OK, Facebook advertising, according to Facebook itself “is a platform designed to help advertisers show people ads they find interesting and relevant”. Emphasis on the words “interesting” and “relevant”, its one aspect that small businesses always overlook. If an ad doesn’t provide contextual value to its viewers, you’ve probably setup yourself for a poor start. So keep those two words in mind as we progress, you’d need them.

Different types of Facebook ads

Some people might not know this, but Facebook ads appear in different formats, each with its own perks and reasons they should be used. We’d run through them here:

1. Page like Ads

These ads are designed to drive traffic to / promote a Facebook page. They’re very similar to standard ads except that the title of the ad is the name of the page.

2. External domain ads

These are standard ads that show up on the right hand column on desktop/laptop devices. They point to an external website/domain, and a custom title can be set unlike the page like ads.

3. Sponsored Story

These ads are more interactive in the sense that they show actions taken by other users (especially the viewer’s friends) on the sponsored post, so they are seen as more organic. Actions that can be shown cut across a wide range of options from likes to comments, check-ins to questions answered. This ad type is more social and shows profile pictures of the people who recently took action. It also gives you the option to show on specific devices.

4.Page post / Promoted posts

These are normal page posts that have been promoted using a much simpler interface than the normal ad creation process. Page admins will usually see a “Boost post” button towards the bottom of the post and can assign an ad spend value.

5. Facebook offers

Recently introduced, Facebook offers are an easy way to promote deals on your products or services, and although it’s free to create, only your fans will see it. There is an option to promote the offer to increase its reach. And although it isn’t technically an advertising type, it’s an important part of some marketing campaigns.

Facebook marketing reach

Facebook has a Nigerian audience of over 4 million active users and your ads have the potential to reach almost every one of them, depending on how much you have in your advertising budget of course.

To help you reach an audience that will consider your ads as “valuable”, Facebook has a few targeting options for advertisers to work with as you might have noticed from the image above. Options include

–          Age
–          Gender
–          Language
–          Educational level
–          Interests and
–          Connections

You can also target people who have attended specific events, work with a specific company or have a certain job position (like marketing) and many more. All these depends on if those information were properly logged on Facebook, so they are not always an accurate number since not everyone bothers to fill out that information.

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what Facebook advertising really is and how you can use it to your business’ advantage. In my next blog post, I’d be explaining how to create ads and best practices to get the best results.

Have you ever tried using Facebook advertising? Did it work out well, or did you have challenges setting it up? Leave your comments below