Facebook has more than 400 million active users. Recently it reported more traffic than Google Search. Most of Facebook users are 18-37 – adults with disposable income to spend.

That’s why advertising on Facebook presents a fabulous business opportunity. You can drive traffic to your website, connect with a huge community of your target customers, promote your services, products and special offers. What’s more – Facebook offers very cost-effective advertising opportunity through its own pay-per-click ads. However you can do it for free by just creating a business page or a group.

Pay-per-click advertising

Facebook allows businesses to purchase image and text-based ads that can be targeted to a specific demographic based on age, location, gender, marital status, interests and more. Therefore a luxury wedding planner in King’s Lynn can target women who are 25-40, engaged, within 20 miles from King’s Lynn and are college graduates. It’s impossible to achieve such targeting with Google AdWords as all you can specify is someone’s location.

Ads are charged on a cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (or 1,000 impressions, CPM) basis. You can set up a daily budget and a bid per click or impressions. The minimum daily budget is $1. Facebook will show a suggested bid range displaying what other advertisers targeting your demographic are paying. To get good results you’ll need to bid somewhere in the middle of the suggested range.

How to succeed with Facebook Ads:

• Great Image – find an eye-catching and relevant image, as ads with images tend to get noticed more.
• Catchy text – keep your ad wording concise. Ads are restricted to 25 characters for the title and 135 characters for the body.
• Teasing header – be creative when writing your ad. A header that grabs attention tends to improve your click-through ratio.
• Soft landing – your ad needs to link to a “landing page” if you promote content outside Facebook. The landing page needs to be 1) compact, 2) clear, 3) with a call to action and 4) containing a means of collecting everyone’s information.
• Endless testing – create a few version of the same ad, but each slighly different (image or header or text). Don’t make ads too different as you won’t be able to understand what exactly was working. Then, when running all ads at the same time, you will be able to measure what’s working in order to get more clicks at a cheaper rate.
• Target marketing – unless you’ve got an unlimited advertising budget you need to think really carefully about targeting your advertising campaign. With over 8 different parameters to play with, there is no excuse not to create a detailed customer avatar before starting the campaign!

You can find more tips and articles on how to create a winning Facebook Advertising campaign here.

Facebook Groups and Pages

You can create Facebook groups and pages, which users can then join or become a fan of. You can suggest the page or group to your friends first, then ask them to do the same in turn. You can also promote the links via your website, email signature and newsletter. Groups and Pages represent a great opportunity to really connect with your consumers, advertise your offers and promotions to people who are actively interested to hear from you (by being fans). And it’s free to set one up too!

How to succeed with Facebook Pages:

•  First plan why you are creating a page: is it to promote your business? or a product? or your industry in general? What are you going to talk about on the Page?
• You will need to keep the content fresh, by regularly adding news, images and videos on a regular basis. It’s good to link your Page to your Blog and YouTube stream.
• Invite existing Facebook friends and e-mail contacts to attract an initial membership base. Then you can create a unique username for the page at facebook.com/username (you need to have at least 25 fans).
• Facebook has many applications you can add to your page to enhance its functionality: Twitter, Blogs, Marketplace, Videos, Reviews etc. But nothing compares to the actual interaction between you and your fans. And that’s what it’s all about.

You can find TJConsulting Facebook Page here – feel free to become a fan too if you like what you see.