I am sort of conflicted about Facebook ads effectiveness. I do not genuinely believe any service professional needs to use them, because they could pick up more long term benefits from building relationships on Facebook with other professionals. At the same time, I know that a number of my friends in the internet marketing community are beginning to talk about Facebook ads as the legitimate alternative to Google ads, which is overpriced and has no customer service. I still am at a loss over Facebook ads effectiveness.
For me here are the questions that need to be evaluated to determine if Facebook ads can be a useful tool in your marketing arsenal:
1. Can you build a list from Facebook ads?
2. Will it bring in faster profits?
Can you build a list from Facebook ads? The great thing about Facebook ads is that you can easily direct people to join your fan page. That is one way to start discovering engaged users of your services.
Another strategy is to set up a fan page with an aweber email list embedded in your front page. Called an FBML page, this is the only true place on Facebook where you can customize your page to your exact standards. Additionally, by providing freebies for those who join your subscription list you will be able to create a list that you can go back to over and over again with new products.
Building a list through Facebook ads is probably the best reason to even consider using the service, although not the only one.
Will it bring profits faster? Social networking is great for building a long term revenue stream. It is not, however, in most cases an overnight money maker. I tell my clients to expect to be using social networking 3-6 months before finding your first client. It is simply not the quickest way to build a business. It will speed up your efforts, on the other hand, versus more traditional methods, such as networking and cold calling. The latter of which is becoming more and more grueling as consumers become more savvy about cold calling techniques.
That is why mixing social networking with Facebook ads might make it more effective for you to bring in business faster. At the same time, it could piss people off, who tire of seeing your posts and ads everywhere they go. Drawing a fine line between interesting and annoying can be a challenge, so be careful.
As I go back and forth between not really liking cost per click ad models like Google and Facebook at all to thinking this might be worth another look. I am interested in your thoughts about Facebook ads effectiveness?
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Many people have now jumped on the bandwagon of internet marketing. Whatever method you try on the internet, you will find people doing it already. Everywhere you will turn, you will face severe competition. List building? Very easy, many gurus will harp. Most will never tell you how many years they took to build a list of few thousand.
Cary,
I agree that differentiating yourself online is probably one of the most challenging obstacles in building a successful business through the web. Because it is easy to pay $25 to advertise on Facebook, Google, and other ad-based search networks lots of people do it. At the same time, what I have found is that when you really look around at everyone doing all this activity, only 2-4% of people actually do it on a continual basis. Everyone told me how hard it was to get 1000 Twitter followers and now I have 40,000. With a little bit of persistence I am now ranked 5th as an Ezine article writer out of roughly 4,000 writers on that subject. The fact is that most people do not consistently work at it long enough to become successful. I am about to write my blog for the day, and this seems like a good point to expand on. You inspired the post that will be out later this morning.
Andy