Let’s face it. Facebook ain’t what it used to be. Create a “cute” post, publish it out to your followers and watch it magically show up right in front of their noses in the news feed.
With 2.5 billion (yep… BILLION) active users each month, every company is trying to get a piece of the Facebook pie. With that said, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… everyone has turned into a pay-to-play platform. If you want people to see the hard work you put into developing content, you’re going to need to put some backing to it.
Facebook and Instagram share the same advertising platform, which makes sense since they are both part of the same company. They also share the ability to cross-post on one another. While this might sound great as a time saver for marketers, it has its pitfalls:
- When posting to Instagram from Facebook, your Instagram #hashtags show up in your Facebook post and those are totally useless to your Facebook audience.
- If you post to Facebook from Instagram and you tag someone, that tagging falls off. It’s better to do the post in both platforms, separately.
- Do you know that “link in bio” Instagram trick? If you share that post to Facebook from Instagram your Facebook followers will have no link to click on. Not ideal for driving traffic.
Those are just a handful of the plethora of pitfalls when trying to cut corners in your social media game. I could go on, but we’d be here all day.
Let’s move on to advertising on Facebook.
While Advertising with Google Adwords is great, you are only getting in the eyes of people who were trying to find you. Let’s say you sell funny holiday t-shirts and someone just so happens to be looking for hilarious holiday tees. They go to Google, type what they are intending to find and “wha-la!” There you are. This consumer is browsing, and being served ads, based on intent.
Facebook advertising is different. Not only can you target the age and gender of folks who typically buy your hilarious holiday tees, but by utilizing Facebook’s robust user data you are able to target psychographics.
“Psychographics? Huh?” Yep. Psychographics are interests, attitudes and behaviors that have been tracked by Facebook since the beginning of its day. You can combine these attributes with your demographic profile and create an audience with a high likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Going back to your t-shirt biz, now we can target people with Facebook advertising tactics for those who like holiday parties, laughing, and funny t-shirts. We are serving up ads based on interest.
Another powerful part of the Facebook advertising platform is what is referred to as a “Look-A-Like” audience. You take a list of email addresses from your customer database and load it into the platform. Facebook will then match those email addresses to Facebook accounts in their platform. From there, they align activities, interests and behaviors from your customer’s accounts to other profiles with similar attributes. This creates a unique audience of Facebook users who are similar to your t-shirt loving tribe. They are more likely to convert!
Facebook offers many different types of ads depending on your goals. Whether you are trying to generate leads, create engagement, or sell your t-shirts directly in the Facebook platform, there is an advertising opportunity within Facebook.
If you’re interested in social advertising for your brand or business, continue your journey with Buhv here.
