How to Advertise on Facebook

Facebook offers an affordable and easy way to advertise on its site. While Facebook users are looking to engage with their friends rather than shop online, the opportunity to create brand recognition through a “circle of friends” is endless.

1. Decide what you want to advertise. Are you looking to add members to a “fan” page? Do you have a great new construction site that not many people have heard about yet? Are you offering a limited time special you want to “get out there”?

For the purposes of this example, we are going to advertise our new construction site, “The Lofts at Happyville” in Williamsburg, Virginia, which are for lease.

2. Next, we need to design our ad.

Not much to it – choose a title, a picture and some brief verbage.

3. Now, we need to select our target audience.

Facebook defaults to the entire community over the age of 18. That gives us just about 61,000,000 people.

We need to go ahead and narrow that down. Lets start with the age – our targeted demographic includes college students so we are going to select 18-25 for our age group. We are also going to only target those users in the United States who are in a 50-mile radius of Williamsburg. Lastly, we will select those who indicate they are “in college”. That drops our targeted group down to 3,320 people.

4.  Now, we need to name our campaign and insert our budget.  How long do we want this campaign to run?  What is our total budget and what is our daily budget?  Do we want to pay for impressions or clicks?

In our scenario, we are a new community so we are looking for brand recognition.  Normally, this would warrant a CPM (pay per impression) campaign; however, since we have a special offer, we want to actually do a CPC (pay per click) campaign.  The current suggested “bid” price is $.46 – $.59.  The narrower your targeted audience, the higher the price.  We are going to bid a price in the middle $.52.  It is estimated that at this expenditure, we will receive 20 clicks per day.  The actual cost of our per click will most likely be less than our bid price.

5.  From here, we click on “create” and pay for our ad.  That’s all there is to it.  It takes approximately 15 minutes for the ad to be approved and start running.  At any time, we can view the analytics for our ad and/or edit the ad.

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