It may be time to start a Facebook advertising campaign.
If you watched The Social Network,  you may remember that a critical bone of contention among the founders was when to add advertising capabilities to Facebook as a way to monetize the site. Facebook has come a long way since the early days, and the advertising capabilities are now surprisingly robust.

Given a limited budget, you would still be better served allocating a majority of it to Pay-Per-Click advertising, especially on Google. However, if you’ve developed a solid social media strategy, and if your company’s Facebook page is filled with robust content (posts, pictures, user feedback, etc.), then it is worthwhile to consider advertising to Facebook.
There are various ways to advertise on Facebook. For this article, we’ll focus on 3:

1. Promote an Individual Post: Those who like your page, and their friends, will see your promoted post as a sponsored story in their news feed. Since these people can like, comment, or share this post, the additional exposure your post would get by promoting it could only translate to more leads or sales.
2. “Claim an Offer”: Create an offer, like a coupon, for use on your web site or in your brick and mortar location, and enable your Facebook followers to “claim” it.  
3. Pay-Per-Click Ads: Facebook’s PPC option, is somewhat like Google AdWords but offers excellent, highly definable targeting options.

Promote an Individual Post

One of the easiest ways to advertise on Facebook is to simply promote an individual post. When logged in as an account administrator, as you get ready to post something, you will see a “Promote” button. When you press it, you will see options for how to initialize advertising for the post. For example, you can choose a budget, decide who your audience is, and specify a duration for the promotion. Individual promotion is especially useful if you want to increase exposure of a post which references a special offer that expires at some point in the near future.

You can increase exposure of a particular post on Facebook with the “Promote” option.

“Claim an Offer”
This is a relatively new feature of Facebook advertising. The concept behind it is that you can allow your Facebook followers to access a particular offer by “claiming it.” There are 3 kinds of offers:
In-Store Only: People can show to the staff at your business by printing the offer email or showing it on their smartphones. In-Store & Online: People can redeem at your business’s physical location or website. Online Only: People can only redeem your offer by visiting your website.	You can allow users to “claim an offer” either online only, or within a physical store location.

This is extremely easy to setup. Let’s say you simply want to create an online coupon and allow Facebook followers to claim it (option #3 above). Instead of posting a regular message via the “status” option, you would choose “Offer, Event +.” Choose Offer, then “Online Only” and add some simple offer details. When this offer gets added to your page, a user can click to claim or redeem the offer by agreeing to the terms. They’ll then receive the offer details via email. Since it’s a web offer, you would make sure to specify the URL of your store where your Facebook follower can redeem the coupon.

Conversely, if you chose to allow redemption in a physical store, you can include a printable coupon (with barcode) that the user can print from their email and bring in to your physical location.

Pay-Per-Click Ads

With Facebook’s pay-per-click you compose a text/image ad, and then either pay per 1,000 impressions (CPM) or on a per-click basis (CPC). This makes it a little bit more like Google AdWords. If you currently run Google AdWords advertising, this Facebook option will feel most familiar to you. However, the targeting options are significantly better than Google as Facebook knows so much more about each of us. You will have various options for how to target your ad.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s just assume you want to increase the “likes” for your page. When you choose to set up the ad via the Build Audience> Create an Ad button, you can customize the following audience-related options:

1. Location (anywhere in the world)
2. Age
3. Gender
4. Precise Interests (you type in specific topics)
5. Broad Categories (you choose from a list of predetermined interest categories)
6. Connections (target to anyone, or just people who aren’t already followers of your page)
7. Friends of Connections (target to your followers’ fiends)

These options give you a very precise level of targeting options to promote your Facebook page (or your website’s URL, if you choose to send users directly there instead).

Already have experience with Facebook advertising? We’d love to hear about it. Connect with us on Facebook by clicking here:https://www.facebook.com/OpenMovesInc. Post your thoughts for a chance to be part of our next PPC case study. And if you have questions or need help setting up your first advertising Facebook PPC campaign give us a holler.