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Facebook Advertising: Is It Money Well Spent?
November 22, 2010 | Posted in Ken's Blog | Leave a Comment

Ken's Blog

My daughter Nori and I have started experimenting with Facebook ads on her SBI!-built site, anguilla-beaches.com, to get the feel of how to best use Facebook advertising for SBIers.

It's something to consider once you have at least 30 content pages (you need to show a site that is substantial enough to hold interest and generate credibility). But here's a key point to remember about this Social Media Marketing strategy...

Don't buy Facebook ads for the traffic. Buy them to get Likes, e-zine subscriptions and so on.

OK, back to our experiment. So far (just getting started), Nori and I buy them to...

1) increase her profile on the island of Anguilla (she's much better known internationally, since that is where the tourists are). This continues to work exceptionally well, with friends around the island "discovering" her site or commenting that they saw it advertised.

How does she target to Anguilla-only?

It's a setting. She chooses to advertise to folks (using Facebook) who are in Anguilla. Would you believe 4,000 people have generated hundreds of thousands of exposures?

2) Ditto for advertisers. By targeting folks in Anguilla, she reaches those who offer something to tourists (hotels, airline, whatever). Different copy, different link. Nori links these folks to her page about advertising.

3) She also targets folks who specifically like "Anguilla" as an interest. Talk about a juicy target. She wants "LIKEs" from them, and later will offer RSS and e-zine subscriptions.

4) She has a general ad for "best island in the Caribbean," which brings tons of exposures and over 100 LIKEs so far. All this, for pennies per click and a very low CTR... the low CTR means that she also gets excellent repeat exposure to her site.

What's the take-away lesson of our testing so far? The power of FB advertising depends on determining...

1) what you want to achieve

2) setting the demographics appropriately.

One thing... if you don't get the results you first expect, don't give up. It's so cheap. Get creative instead.

All the best,

P.S. Are you an SBIer? Click here for additional resource articles about Facebook advertising.

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