If you’re planning to advertise your small business on Facebook, you need to keep in mind your audience and their reason for being on the site so you’ll approach them in an appropriate, effective way.
When planning a marketing campaign on Facebook, try to make it as social and as close to people’s normal Facebook behavior as possible, advises Craig Robinson of Qwaya, which makes a Facebook advertising tool. Your goal should be to make your marketing become a recommendation, a story that looks natural in the news feed, he says.
Facebook offers advertisers sponsored stories that highlight when someone takes action around a brand, like comments on the fan page, tagging an image, liking a post, using an app, voting in a poll, checking in or some other action. These ads fit better with visitors’ reason for being on Facebook.
There is another upside to clever social-advertising campaigns: They may turn organic. When you start acquiring fans through sponsored stories, these fans have friends who will see there’s activity on your page, and when people start commenting or using your fan page even more, friends of fans will see that too.
If you’ve put some effort into your fan page – with a nice design and useful content for visitors – fans might start coming back to the page organically.
Adapted from What SMBs Need to Know About Advertising on Facebook at Small Business Computing.