Facebook Advertising – It’s What They Want, Not What You Think They Want

You may have noticed if you use Facebook at all, that from time to time you’ll see advertisements on Facebook. But with Facebook advertising you have to give people what they want, not what you think they want.Because there is such a huge number of Facebook users, Facebook advertising sounds like a very tempting way to reach your target audience. It is, and it’s very effective, but there are a few points that differentiate it from traditional forms of online advertising.Window ShoppersFacebook users are not like search engine users. On a search engine people type in a search term because they want to find something. This could be a product, news or information. But in general, on Facebook people are searching for one thing, and that’s other people.They want to be social.They’re not in a buying frame of mind.Bearing that in mind, how then do you use Facebook advertising to reach someone who only wants to be social? Someone who is not looking for products?To begin with you need to be able to attract their attention to move them away from their social frame of mind to be curious enough to click on your ad. Luckily Facebook solves this problem by allowing image ads, so right from the start you’ve got something that, depending on how creative you are, makes your ad more likely to be clicked on.Make sure your image is eye catching and within the Facebook guidelines.Start SlowlyAdvertising on any sort of media, and in particular Facebook advertising requires a lot of testing. The only reliable way to increase the number of people who click on your ads, is to split test them. That means you change one element of your ad at a time and compare the results you get by running the changed ad and the original advertisement side by side. Which ever gets the best ratio of number of times clicked to the number of times the ad has been shown is the winner. You then change an element in the winning ad and repeat the same process with the winning ad now being the original.Try Upsells Instead Of Direct SalesInstead of sending people straight to a sales page, Facebook advertising works best when you send them to an information page, and then offer an upsell on the information page. For example you could send them to a blog and in the post you send them to, there’s a link to a sales page.You must ensure that the page you’re sending the person to directly pays off what was promised in the ad, otherwise it will not be approved by Facebook.So Facebook advertising can be a very worthwhile traffic strategy, just be sure to keep in mind some of the differences to traditional search engine advertising.