A Perspective on Facebook Advertising

When you start a business, perhaps a handful of people will know of your services. Then you do good work, and more people know about you. The word-of-mouth spreads and the networks grow.

But who forms these networks?
Who is your target audience?
How do you reach them?
How do you strengthen your bonds with all of them?
And last but not the least, how do you reinvent your business?

The answers to the above questions and much more, lies in the rapid growth and popularity of social networking sites like Facebook. With the platforms they are offering, they are certainly changing the way we look at business. In this segment, we will leave aside all other websites and only concentrate on facebook; as the leader in terms of active users. Facebook reports a user base of 8 million profiles or actual, real people – actively using it to share ideas, plans and perspectives.

In simple words, take a look at this:
Conventional advertising would probably adopt media like television, radio or newspapers. To go a step further, big brands would have brand ambassadors. Hollywood stars, sports stars or musicians are conventionally seen as the face of the brand.

But, THIS is changing with facebook.

Here the common man is the brand ambassador. He shares his thoughts with his friends and has genuine conversations. In other words, YOUR customer or possible customer is ultimately the face of your brand.

Why this is important is because, your buyer has the power to influence. He lives his own life in his own circle, but he buys your services or products – and hence, your connection with him not only becomes important but also mandatory.

This is where facebook enters as the “game changer”.

If you step out of your office, you will notice people on the street. Majority of them are facebook users. Every day when they go home or before they come to work, they put up status messages about things that are important to them, many of them follow events on their profile and like pages that interest them; interact with friends and talk about their activities. Many don’t really participate, but hang around and choose from the options they have. These people are your buyers.

It is this potential that facebook is capitalizing on, with facebook advertising and possibly, you should too!

It works two ways: In offering your service as an advertisement on facebook, facebook inc. is serving its users better. By providing them deals about things that may be of relevance to their life, the user or the buyer is satisfied; while the client, who has placed the advertisement, does better business.

So, while not compromising on their policies, facebook has gone to become a “profitable” organization rather than just one that “connects” people.

They bring your target group to you for each of your campaigns.

Take a look at the chart here.

[Image source:Wikipedia]

This data is furnished to Facebook by its users, certainly under privacy norms. Now, Facebook uses the data and groups its users into categories like different age groups. When specific advertiser is interested in a specific age group of people, then facebook helps them to reach out to exactly the correct target audience.

One most note here, that this isn’t breach of trust because these user profiles are not being traded out. The engineering at facebook helps reach the relevant data to the right people, while securing the information.

Suppose an advertiser wants to promote his investment banking proposals, he would prefer to look at working men and women; possibly in the age group 26-34 years and 35-45 years. As seen in the chart, this would mean people in the green and purple region. The advertising can further be region specific, locality specific, profession specific etc.

The world of advertising is changing with these advancements.

However, while this sure seems to be “smart” work, there are challenges that need to be overcome. Facebook, also being just another website, is ultimately prone to internet viruses, hackers and attacks. In recent reports, as recent as January 2012, facebook has been found to be infected by a virus which has stolen data from almost 45 thousand User profiles. Majority of these profiles belonged to France and United Kingdom.

Therefore the question here is, how safe is your data on facebook? And more so, how authentic is your advertising? As long as the ROI isn’t bad, you can plunge in and take the risk – and meanwhile, facebook will have to get its engineers to pass the ‘security’ check!

Author’s Bio:
Priti Pandya is an avid blogger working with an SEO Company that offers Website Development Service and other internet marketing related services for the past 6 years.