Facebook Ads | Business Basics Series
Banner Ads
Facebook makes money by selling advertising space on their site, called banner ads. These ads can usually be seen down the right hand side of the website. Ads in this space have a set format of an image, a headline, a text area which all links through to another page. Ads can either link to another page on Facebook, or another website altogether. Facebook allows you to broadly, or very specifically target the audience for your ad, that is, you can set your ad to display to a whole country, or a specific gender, age range, location and set of interests.
Once you have some likes on your page, you will have the option to display ads to those who have liked your page and their friends. In this way you would hope to reach an audience of similar interests.
Facebook Ads – Promoted Posts
A “softer” type of advertising that Facebook makes available is what they call “promoted posts”. This is where you have the option to “boost” your post, which means to pay to have the post appear in the news feed of an audience that you can specify.
As in a newspaper, your ads can get lost amongst all the other content that is happening on Facebook, or simply ignored, as users become conditioned to ignore ads. By creating content posts and boosting/promoting them, you are placing your advertising content amongst the prime real estate of the user’s attention. This is more like the “advertorial” model that you might see in a newspaper or magazine.
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*Information provided is accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time of publishing. Advice is general in nature, and may not be applicable to your particular situation.