Facebook Advertising For Beginners

Facebook Advertising For Beginners 

Happy New Year!! I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas. Welcome to my first blogpost of the decade. I thought i'd spend this blogpost discussing the power of Facebook advertising.

With over 2 billion active monthly users of Facebook, the Facebook ad network is the second most popular ad network in the world with over a billion people seeing ads through the network.

So you've set up your Facebook Business Page and started to post content and now you want to dabble into the world of Facebook advertising, but unsure of where to start I hope you find this blog post helpful.

Regular posting on your Facebook page is a great way to keep the people who've either followed your page or liked your content up to date with whats happening in your business. Posting informative content 1-2 times a week will not only help to grow your following organically but increase your follower engagement too.

However if you want to grow your following quickly and want to reach people who are not following your page or liked your content, you might've been considering Facebook's paid opportunities such as boosted posts but unsure where to start.

4 reasons to consider Paid Facebook posts (sponsored posts)

Unfortunately Facebook has decreased organic reach, meaning businesses need to explore paid advertising to boost their reach, however before you get started with any paid advertising it is important to to be really clear on your business goals, for example you may want to:

1. Expand your audience and increase your number of followers
2. Showcase your business products or services to new customers
3. Raise awareness amongst local residents
4. Drive traffic to your website 

So before creating an ad and deciding what type of promotion you want to use, be specific about what you want to achieve.

Facebook Advertising Types

When you've defined your business objectives, you can select the Facebook advertising option to align to your business objective. Below outlines the various types of advert options available to you:

Boosted posts 

Are a great way for new people to see and engage with your page and popular posts. This is where you can easily convert an organic post to a paid post. So if you have created a post where you want to reach new people simply click the "boost post" button below your post and start creating your ad. Boosting a post simply switches your organic post to a paid post and instantly becomes an advert.

Facebook post with the "boost post" option below

Cons of boosting a Facebook post

• You have less control over where your ads are seen (desktop vs. mobile), etc. If you know where your audience converts, it can be frustrating to see that your ad is NOT served there.
• You don't get the same level of targeting as page promotions which I talk about below.

Page Promotions Types

If Boosting a post is not something you want to explore, there are other ways you can promote your page that Facebook provide. These other options  have specific ad objectives that you can see when you click the "Promote button". These options allow you to define who you want to target and when you want to target them.

Facebook Objective Options

• Promote your call-to-action - This type of a encourage people to make an action such as send a message or shop now.

• Promote your page This is great for driving engagement, so if you want more comments and likes.

• Promote your business locally - This is perfect for encouraging local people to visit your physical business premises.

• Get more website visitors  - Great for driving more people to your website.

• Lead ads - This is perfect for requesting contact details from potential new customers. So whether you need to collect email addresses or need people to sign up their interest this is great for capturing contact details.

Facebook Lead ad

• Boost an event - Great for driving awareness of your event or to boost ticket sales. Please view example below of Hubspot encouraging people to sign up to their event.

Facebook Event Ad

• Automated adverts  - This is where Facebook provide custom advert planning based on the information you tell them about your business.

Free resources

• Facebook For Business provide some free courses on Facebook advertising which you should check out here.
• Hubspot have a free ebook for creating Facebook adverts- check that out here.
• Buffer have a free Facebook advertising guide - check it out here .

Summary

I hope you've found today's blogpost on the different types of Facebook advertising helpful. If your business currently uses Facebook advertising,  I'd love to know what works for you.

Until the next time my fellow entrepreneurs...