Facebook Ads: 5 steps to get you started. Real fans in seconds!

Ok so, Facebook ads.

A tool anyone can use to benefit their own or their client's Facebook page/timeline. Facebook ads give you the ability to target fans locally and or internationally. This tool can work for any business or brand in any country anywhere... pretty much. After reading this post you will be able to start your own campaign at: http://www.facebook.com/ads

Basically, you can target fans in your or any geographical location whether it be South Africa, America, the UK etc. and get those people to "like" your Facebook fan page/timeline.

Step 1 : Go to http://www.facbook.com/ads

Go to: http://www.facebook.com/ads and click the little green button in the top right hand corner of the screen

Step 2 : Design Your Advert

After you click the create ad button you get taken to this page. Designing you advert doesn't need to take hours. Get a few images and a few lines of copy to test.

Image:

Your company logo or an image of a pretty girl would work just fine. Create a few different variations to see which images perform better (some won't get clicks at all). Pictures of girls have been known to get lots of clicks and perform rather well.

Copy:
A call to action for the user to like the page is crucial. Try something along the lines of:

"Like" this page if you like <something similar or related to your company/brand>

"Like" this page if you like baking

"Like" this page if you like sports
"Like" this page if you like burgers
"Like" this page if you like heavy metal

these are all very basic, feel free to get wild and do more tests

You don't always need to host a promotion to get people to like the page. Asking an honest question also works very well, not promising anything, and still getting the like.

Step 3 : Targeting

After designing your Facebook ad you must now input the details of your target market.

Age:

Choose the age group that suits your company/brand best.

Interests:
This is a very cool tool that lets you target your target markets other interests. Music, Brands, Actors, TV Shows, DJ's. Play around with that and see which groups respond better.

Connections on Facebook:
Select people who are not yet connected with your page. As time goes on you don't want your ads to be shown to people who have already liked the page.

Total number of targeted fans:
Test anywhere from 25 000 people to 300,000. 

Step 4 : Set your Budget

Campaign budget:

Your budget for ads can be set per day or over a month etc. So take a look at how much you are willing to put aside for your Facebook ads. $2 a day? $100 a day? or $20 a day. It's completely up to you. From my experiences $25 a day can get you a couple of thousand fans over a few weeks

Bid:
Facebook gives you a suggested bid per click, at the bottom of the page.Ask yourself the question... How much am I willing to pay per click? If the ad does well your cost per click can get as low as $0.10. If your ad does not so well then your cost per click could go up to $2.00.

Step 4: Place order

Click the place order button and wait for your ads to be approved. When starting your first campaign, be sure to test a bunch of different images and copy and see what the fans on Facebook respond to the best. Stop the ads that don't work. Duplicate and refine the ones that do work.

Why don't my ad's work?

If your ad gets shown to a bunch of people abut they don't get clicked on, the number of impressions will go up. When impressions go up and no clicks are made, your click through ratio (CTR) starts to decline. When your CTR drops below 0.100% your ads don't get shown as much, or at all. A ratio of 0.200% or 0.250% is awesome

From my experience

There are people industry who sell "likes" for roughly $1.70 a "like" and other people and companies pay that price because they just don't know how it all works.

If you run your own ads you can get very decent prices and a great cost per click and RIO.

The price of my Cost Per Click ads are on average around $0.19 to $0.25 and sometimes $0.30 if you don't keep an eye on it, or if the ad just isn't working properly.

But when you get an ad that really works you can get prices like $0.10 a click. Which is super cheap for authentic real Facebook likes.

In the campaign above I targeted roughly 300,000 people who lived in South Africa and I chose to target a bunch of related interests. The ad did so well that I only had to pay $0.10 a click. Which ended up in very cheap "likes" for my facebook page/timeline

So go to: http://www.facebook.com/ads now and start building up your fanpage/timeline today!

Note: You will need a credit/debit card to pay Facebook for the ads once the campaign has been completed. 

Did this post clarify the idea of Facebook ads for you?