If your company active on social media, or if you want to start, you will have heard of the term, 'paid advertising'.
Pretty much all of the top social networks offer 'paid advertising' in someway or other - Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
However, by far and away, it's Facebook that has fully cornered this market - largely thanks to the sheer amount of data it holds from each of its users.
This makes it a pretty powerful tool for you to segment and target an audience that you can advertise to.
Let's take a look into the power of Facebook Advertising...
Facebook's growth means its power is unrivalled
Have you ever noticed that if you've been 'holiday shopping' online, that an advert for the travel agencies you were browsing later comes up on Facebook? It's the same for high street shops and online retailers. Facebook just 'knows'.
Thanks to its powerful activities, metrics and capabilities, as well as the astonishing size of its user base, Facebook is #1:
- Facebook (desktop/mobile): 1.18 billion daily active users, as of September 2016.
- Instagram: 600 million users, as of December 2016 -- with 50% of all users following a business.
- Facebook Messenger: Over one billion monthly active users, as of July 2016. While those are a big numbers, it’s just the visible part of the iceberg.
In May of 2016, Zuckerberg announced that globally users spend 50 minutes a day on average with Facebook properties.
Kings of mobile marketing
Over the years, Facebook has continued to make a mental note of each and every one of our personal profiles and if you're a business not using the advertising platform, you won't realise just how powerful that can be.
Google has revealed that B2B buyers have increased the amount of mobile research they do by 91% year on year throughout the B2B purchase path - and Facebook has ensured it has the technology and power to 'be there' on that purchasing journey.
Lead Ads allow you to promote your event or ebook and allow users to sign up with only a few clicks - the form is already pre-populated with the data Facebook already has.
Incredible advertising technology
There are lots of targeting options to use with Facebook, including the segmenting tools that you can use as standard, based on the details given by users - i.e. relationship status, age, geographical location, hobbies and interests etc.
You can then take it one step further with a number of Facebook options, including targeting visitors of your website with the Facebook Pixel, targeting friends of your existing users or people in your CRM lists.
The real technology comes with Facebook's audience expansion tool, Lookalike Audiences.
- Lookalike Audiences: Allows you to upload a list of your most valued customers and have Facebook hunt down similar users based on their rich data.
- Advert Sets: Change the way you market by adopting Lead Ads (mentioned above) or Canvas. Canvas enables you to create full screen video adverts.
- Instagram integration: One of the most beautiful things to come out of Facebook's buyout of Instagram is the ability to market on two different platforms using one advert. Instagram advertising space is big and great for creating strong CTAs.
Where can Facebook go next?
There are still so many avenues that Facebook is already working on to improve advertising options for its Facebook Advertising users.
- Video: Facebook is already heavily investing in video - you'd have to be living under a rock to have missed the heavily advertised new add-on, Facebook Live!
- Messenger: As Facebook competes with longstanding, standalone messaging app, WhatsApp, it is looking to integrate its advertising reach into is messaging app, Messenger - which you don't need a Facebook account to use.
