Facebook – A place share your life online or is it a powerful business marketing tool?
The easy answer to that is it’s both. It’s a place to showcase your business in the same timeline as the cat videos. Buyers go to Facebook in nosey mode to see what friends are doing, a good Facebook ad can promote those impulse buys and show those solutions you really didn’t know you needed.
I attended a bootcamp in London earlier in the year and again in Birmingham on Wednesday this week. The feedback on the London event echoed visitors wanted more ‘how to’ and this time they delivered. This event was in conjunction with Enterprise Nation and delved deeper into the strategies of Facebook for business marketing.
It’s hard to imagine just how powerful Facebook can be. A staggering 25 million people in the UK check their news feed at least 11 times a day. These days, even if we don’t think of ourselves as mobile businesses our customers are mobile buyers, we have to have a presence in the place our buyers are and Facebook is one of those places. We own more mobile devices than toothbrushes and sharing sight, sound and motion is the future of marketing your business.
Long gone are the days of simply sharing your products on your own timeline, these will not be as visible as a targeted paid ad or boosted post. Cost is low and controllable. I write the odd post (not as much as I should) about eBay on my Facebook business page normally getting around hundred or so views, I tried a boosted post on the low price of $5 (around £3.50 at the time) set to close when this budget was exhausted. I got a staggering 3800 views for that post. Compare this to a newspaper ad or leaflet campaign and the costs are extremely inviting and worth a try. Ads, videos and boosted posts can also be targeted to a local, national or international audience, by gender age and keywords and also to desktop, mobile or both. Extensive reporting and analytics tools are also available so try, test and alter your ads as you go to get the best effects.
Next time you look on your Facebook news feed check out the ads, there are more on mobile than desktop.
Do you use Facebook ads, video or boosted posts? What sort of success have you had?
