The power of Facebook: Facebook has 1.8 billion monthly users (vs. Instagram’s 600 million monthly users). You can all but guarantee that whatever business you run and in whatever industry or niche, a good percentage of your target audience will be on Facebook.
The catch: With Facebook’s intense and fancy algorithms, those users are highly unlikely to see posts from best friends, let alone business pages, unless you up the ante with sponsored posts.
The good news: Facebooks Ads are relatively cheap compared to other types of online advertising, highly effective and your ad stats are easily measurable. Considering the amount of personal information in Facebook’s database, they allow you to get ridiculously detailed with your targeting. Anything in a user’s profile—age, sex, location, education, religion, interests, politics, job title, marital status, etc.—can be used as a filter for your ads. This allows your ad campaign to have laser focused targeted ad viewers, ensuring that the people who see your ads are highly likely to be your ideal customers (demographic wise).
The better news: Facebook’s Audience Network, launched in 2014, is the newest way for advertisers to extend their Facebook campaigns beyond Facebook. So how does it work?
- Delivering the power of Facebook ads beyond FB – The Audience Network “applies these same powerful features to additional app-based mobile experiences, giving marketers even more scale for their Facebook campaigns. The Audience Network uses the same targeting available for Facebook ads, including custom audiences, core audiences and lookalike audiences. It features the same measurement tools marketers use for their Facebook ads, too.” (source: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/audience-network)
- Extended reach + better results – extending your ads running on Facebook’s News Feed to the Audience Network means your ad (same creative) will be available in all ad interfaces (FB handles optimization & delivery).
- Measurement – you can track app engagement and conversions, demographics, etc. and these campaign results can be broken out by FB vs. Audience Network results so you can see which is working better.
The best news: Facebook just announced they’re bringing new publishers to their ad network (Washington Post, Univision, Rolling Stones, etc.), reaching 1 billion people a month outside of Facebook!
The results: With Facebook’s highly controlled programmatic advertising platform, they claim they can target the billion people with the same accuracy on its own site. Reports show that “audience network increases the amount of people campaigns can reach by 16% on average” and they’re engaging with the videos for more than 10 seconds (longer than the average video view on FB). (source: http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-serving-ads-washington-post-rolling-stone/307486/)
The verdict: Facebook is a business-friendly platform, offering relatively cheap ads that can be incredibly targeted to your ideal audience and even allows your ads to reach outside of FB to help your business extend their reach and gain new customers.
