How to use Facebook to advertise

Traditional advertising can be so costly.  According to Pew Research Centre, “as of January 2014, 74% of Canadians were using social media.”  The decline of print advertising and the rise of social media channels is forcing business owners and the like to keep up with the growing trend of social media used for advertising. We need to catch our target markets attention and we only have 30 seconds to do that due to lower attention spans caused by social media.

Today more people than ever before are talking to their family and friends through these channels before making major purchases.  Why not make your life easier and use the multi media at your finger tips. The good news is, it is actually quite inexpensive to advertise online.  Pinterest, Instagram, U Tube are all free of charge.  Facebook charges very little in relation to the more dated ways of sending messages through television ads, monthly newsletters and newspapers.  

Another invaluable perk to using Facebook as one of your advertising tools is you can choose the demographics who receive your ads on their pages, making your advertising dollars go even further.  What you need first is a business page which you can link to your personal page. This business page has a section called Overview.  At the bottom of the page there is a link which says create ad. That link allows you to search out age groups, male or female, peoples interests that you want to target, education level, language, city, and many more!  Once you have chosen all of your criteria for who you want to receive your ads, you are then ready to go! You can pre pay your account and start reaching the right people.

There are countless ways to use the search tool on Facebook. Market research can also be very costly. Say you were planning to teach a Spanish cooking class to a group of singles and you were wanting to hire Spanish people who like to cook to come and present their favourite meal.  You can use this tool to see how many single people speak Spanish, are interested in cooking in a certain area and put together an ad that would be displayed on their pages only.   This is invaluable information when wanting to stretch our advertising dollars as far as we can and who doesn’t want to do that.

So what are you waiting for, get your social media plan in action. Do not let the initial discomfort of leaving the old methods behind. Your pocketbook will thank you and you will have much more time on your hands to spend doing the fun things in life. There are also Social Media planners to put these plans together and it is their job to manage all of your online media accounts. Results can be measured, which gives the peace of mind to know where those advertising dollars are going and what is working and not.  The trick is to stick with something long enough to see if it works! Consistency is key.