Facebook can be one of the most lucrative sites for online marketers in existence, or it can be a dry and barren desert, where even your best ads receive no responses. While some might say that this is just the nature of the game, and that you really can’t expect that much from a social media site, the facts do not seem to bear that opinion out. In fact, Facebook’s millions of users are far and away the most active when it comes to clicking ads and spreading the word organically to get the ball rolling for customers. It’s just that friends do it on Facebook, not the marketers themselves.
For example, think about how many ads you ignore in a day as you’re browsing around trying to check up on your business. You probably don’t even realize that most of the sites you’re visiting are packed full of someone else’s banner and text ads. You simply pass them by and don’t even give them the time of day. This isn’t because you have anything against others’ ads. It’s more to do with the fact that it’s simply not on your itinerary to give another marketer’s ads a second look.
With the basic Facebook user, this is what they’re contending with – a lot of ads that are just “there” but that aren’t noticed. To get them noticed, you have to play into the social context of the site. You have to realize what people are on Facebook to do.
Using Social Media to Your Advantage
People come to Facebook to check up on and change their status, to see their friends’ profiles and to see what they’re up to, to look for new friends, to join events and to tag and share images and videos, and to essentially check out what’s new and interesting in their respective niche. As you might imagine, looking around at different ads doesn’t exactly make the top-10 list when it comes to things Facebook users do.
In order to use social media to your advantage, you have to understand that friends trust friends. This means that a Facebook user is more likely to check out your advertising material after one of their friends checks it out and gives it the necessary approval. So if friend X views your add via friend Y’s page and realizes that friend Y likes this ad, the ad thus takes on a social context and is viewed as trusted and more worthy of the time spent.
The ad becomes something more than mere marketing material; it takes on a life of its own and becomes part of the entire social networking apparatus. This is something you can accomplish by using a marketplace ad like Facebook Sponsored Stories in order to add some social context to your campaign. Once someone’s friend trusts the ad, they’re far more likely to.
Author: This article is written by Craig Robinson, Editor-in-chief for Qwaya – a Facebook Ad manager tool. Besides writing about social advertisement, Craig writes about customer engagement online and user behavior. If you want to follow him on Twitter, you can do it here!