Facebook Advertising | Social Media Marketing

Do You Want To Reach 350.000.000 Targeted Customers?

I have finally finished and published my Facebook Advertising Guide. It is currently available as a digital download managed by PayDotCom (108 pages, full colour) and it will be later available as a paperback.

Facebook Advertising Guide is not about fancy theories and statistics how to make million dollars on Facebook overnight. This guide book is a practical Facebook guide for all of you who want to learn how Facebook advertising works and how to do it effectively. Within the different chapters of this book I will present visual step-by-step guides how to do certain marketing operations on Facebook. There are also plenty of references and web addresses (URL’s) to various areas on Facebook and the web. Facebook Advertising Guide will show you how to bring your message across to over 350 Million targeted Facebook users quick and easy. I will teach you how you can advertise  effectively on Facebook plus how  you can create and advertise Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Facebook News Feeds and much more. There are also plenty of real life examples of Facebook advertising projects from real companies.

If you would like to get a copy of the new Facebook Advertising Guide, please click here.

The number of customers using Facebook’s online-advertising system has more than tripled in the past 12 months. This means that more and more small- and medium- sized businesses are now using Facebook as part of their online marketing strategy. Lots of local businesses are now finding success in this advertising model. Facebook launched its advertising program in 2007.

The ads, which appear on users’ Facebook profile pages (wall, info, photos etc.) allow 25 characters in the title and as many as 135 characters in the body of the text plus an optional photo. The targeting behind the ads is driven by the personal profiles of Facebook users. If you list Simpsons as your favourite TV-show, you will probably see an ad from Foxtel sooner or later.

Wired’s Fred Vogelstein thinks that Facebook is poised to take over display advertising the way that Google has dominated search advertising. Internet users behave differently on Facebook than anywhere else online. Most of them use their real names, connect with their real friends, share their real thoughts, tastes and news. This is what makes Facebook audience so appealing to advertisers. You have real people with personal qualities who can be divided into exact consumer categories. Google, Yahoo and other search engines, on the other hand know little about of its users other than their search histories and some browsing activity.

Doubling its membership in March, Twitter is growing even faster than Facebook. As you might remember, at the end of last year, Facebook tried to buy Twitter for $500M but failed miserably. If Facebook had secured Twitter’s huge stake on the real time user generated information, they could have secured the dominant position in user generated live content. More and more Internet users are transferring their social habits to Twitter and Facebook from sites like Friendster and MySpace. In May this year, Facebook surpassed MySpace in the US, which was the last strong hold for the News Corp owned site. According Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg Facebook’s revenue may climb 70 percent this year. Also last month, Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies paid $200 million for less than 2 percent of Facebook, valuing the company at $10 billion. Earlier Microsoft had secured a 1.6% stake for $240 million.

Facebook is based in Palo Alto, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Wired is a monthly magazine published since March 1993. Wired reports on how technology affects culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast Publications, it is published in San Francisco, California.

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Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the world. It is one of the greatest applications alongside Twitter and MSN Live Messenger to keep up with your friends.  But did you know that you can use Facebook effectively to promote your products and/or services as well? Facebook is also an execellent vehicle to create or reinforce brand awareness.

Here are two effective methods you can use Facebook for business purposes:

1. Facebook Ads. Advertising your products or services with Facebook Ads you can reach upto 200 million active Facebook users. These advertisements are the small ads you see on the right hand side of your profile page. For some reason I tend to get a lot of beer ads (?). As a marketer you can advertise to your potential audience by using their age, gender, location or personal interests as a targeting factor.  You also can target people with specific keywords they have written in their profiles. This type of advertising is one of the most targeted marketing vehicles in the world! There are very few competing medias where you can use so many specific factors as how to reach your audience.

2. Fan pages. Another way of advertising on Facebook is creating a fan page about your product or service. A lot of rock bands use this method very effectively. For instance, a great Finnish Goth Rock band Nightwish have over 250,000 fans! Do you think you could do some serious marketing to that audience? Yes, you could! You can start discussions, post photos and write announcements on your page for your fans to see. You can also send official updates to all of your fans, or just a segment of your fans who, say, are female and live in Sydney Australia. (Image by Andy Warhol.)

Facebook has launched its new, updated Marketplace.  Facebook Marketplace is a space where users can sell their unwanted stuff.  This time the Marketplace is powered by a company with a funny name, Oodle. Despite the name they are a big online classifieds company founded by former Excite and eBay executives. Since its launch in 2005, Oodle has grown rapidly and now gets over four million unique visitors each month. Oodle is privately owner and their headquarters is in San Mateo, California.

Facebook first introduced the Marketplace application in mid 2007 as a way for people to post classified listings on the site. The idea was great, but the execution was not so.  Facebook realised this and therefore late 2008, Facebook turned to Oodle for its expertise in online classifieds. Oodle has built a completely new version of the Marketplace focused on giving people a place to buy, sell or give things away to the people they know. Only time will tell wether this incarnation is better or …worse.

If you have already tried the new Facebook Marketplace, I would love to hear your comments and views. Just click the comment hotlink at the top right corner of this post.

If you want to learn how to sell your stuff on the new Facebook Marketplace effectively, please feel free to download my free Guide > > > .

As we speculated last month, Facebook is about to hand over its official classifieds listings to a partner, and that partner is Oodle, we have been able to confirm. An announcement may be made as early as tomorrow.

What is interesting about this deal is that Oodle already powers the classifieds on MySpace. Even though Facebook and MySpace are archrivals, this makes sense because in classifieds scale matters. The more listings and the more people seeing those listings, the better.

Classifieds so far have failed on Facebook because they have not been reengineered to be more social. Oodle should take a look at iList, which tries to make listings go viral by letting friends promote your listings for you.

By becoming the preferred classifieds partner, Oodle’s app would be promoted by Facebook in return for a cut of revenues generated by listing fees and the like. Facebook is also looking for a partner to ru

Social media study shows 59 out of 100 leading retailers currently have a Fan Page on Facebook.

The study conducted in the US included 100 retailers with a prominent e-commerce presence. 59% of the retailers studied have produced a Fan Page on Facebook.  These retailers include Best Buy, Toys R Us, Kohl’s and Wal-Mart. If you plan your Facebook presence correctly you can attract a lot of interest. For instance a popular liqueur, Jagermeister has currently over 156,000 fans.  Not bad for a drink, eh?

Last year we have reached critical mass with Facebook marketing. It is no longer an option to be there. It is a must if you want to succeed globally. Social media sites are an important source of consumer connection and retailers are now using Facebook to reach their potential customers.  Facebook users can be profiled according to the details they give on their basic (demographics) and personal information (activities, interests, favourite music, favourite movies, book etc.). It is this information that the retailers and advertisers can use to reach their exact target audience. For instance, if you list Ballroom Dancing or Yoga in your activities or interests, you will most likely get advertisements related to those areas.

An effective Facebook presence requires that you carefully consider what your potential customers are looking for, what you would like to communicate, and what role a fan page should play in your overall marketing strategy. If you take all of these into account, it can be very effective in building customer loyalty and brand awareness.

(Study conducted in April of 2008 and updated in September of 2008 by Rosetta Marketing Agency)