Starting Out on Facebook: Small Business Marketing Solutions or Useless Sales Pitch?

That's some brand love.

A few weeks ago, Facebook Marketing Solutions, the advertising side of the social media giant, released its new education portal for small businesses just starting out online, titled Facebook for Business.

Are Facebook Ads for All Businesses?

Facebook Ads. Are You Doing it Right?

Recently a slew of articles have been popping up about the ineffectiveness of Facebook advertising. While we recently touched on this subject in a previous blog post, I thought I would explain why this statement has little credence when Facebook ads are done properly. If you’ve read any of our previous FB blog posts, you are aware that for Search Influence, Facebook yields a low cost per lead making it one of our most effective ways to drive leads to clients’ sites. With that being stated, I can proceed to explain (in a Clarissa-esque manner) why Facebook is effective and ineffective for some online marketers and industries.

Increasing Facebook Ads Performance with Images

Choosing the Right Images for Your Facebook Ads

Image from www.adrants.com

In a previous Facebook Advertising blog post I mentioned the importance of selecting images for your Facebook ads. What I failed to do in that post was to fully explain that idea. Sure I threw out some fancy jargon about “magazine editorial ads”, but I wanted to take this time to show you three types:

1) Contextually Relevant

Facebook Ad 1

Facebook Advertisting - The Internet Marketing Gold Rush

I am frequently asked what the next big thing in paid marketing is – while I tend to keep my online marketing secrets close to my chest, I always answer Facebook. With hundreds of millions active users, it is Sutter’s Mill in the pay-per-click Gold Rush. As paid search platforms are experiencing exponential growth and decay, it offers advertisers an opportunity to target potential leads at a significantly lower cost than traditional PPC.

As the world’s largest social media site, Facebook has become the popular choice for the local and niche businesses. By allowing marketers to directly interact with people through paid ads, interest groups and applications, it adds a level of engagement lacking in traditional online marketing.

Facebook Introduces Conversion Tracking for Advertisers

Data.

This is the most fundamental building block when trying to determine the success of a Pay-Per-Click campaign.

Data tells you if that “iffy” ad copy you wrote is actually paying off and it also tells you when something’s gone belly up and is stinking up your cost per lead. But despite being extremely useful, data is also extremely problematic especially when you are using third party report tool with unrelated PPC platform.  The data gets well… unpleasant. This statement has been especially true for me using tools such as Analytics to track Facebook advertising performance.

Exploring the Successfulness of Facebook Advertising

Hi, my name is Anthony and I am a recovering search marketing luddite.

Facebook Yields High ROI on PPC Ads

For years there have been only three internet ad services I viewed successful: Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and MSN Adcenter.  Don’t misunderstand; I was aware of other services.  I am a social media packrat after all, but I never considered them realistic alternatives to the holy SEM trinity. They seemed like gimmicks. As PPC manager at Search Influence, I provide these services to our clients but I never realized how truly profitable social media advertising was until I started comparing the conversion rates. The numbers spoke loud and clear – Facebook (to my surprise) was generating a high return with a significantly lower cost because of demographic targeting and editorial-like advertisements.