In this blog, the author has tried to explain to a layman Facebook’s Advertising Ecosystem. It would help the reader understand why do advertisers put their money on Facebook.
Over the years Facebook has drawn attention from early adopters to experimenters to businesses genuinely interested in figuring out how to reach their target audience. Let’s consider statistics shown by the graphics below:
Source: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/facebook-statistics/
Understanding the Facebook Ecosystem
If you have been advertising on Facebook, you most certainly have heard these catchwords buzzing around. So what is the difference between Paid, Owned and Earned Media and how is it meaningful to you when you advertise on Facebook?
The Facebook Marketing Triad
- Paid Media-Paid media is a good way to break the ice on social media.Using paid media to advertise on Facebook is a brilliant option not only to promote your brand/ content, but also to direct traffic to owned media properties like websites, blog sites and other social media channels. You can potentially boost your content and influence the reach and recognition your brand receives. Using SEO, PPC (Pay Per Click), Display Ads and Re-Targeting, you can draw the much needed visibility towards your budding brand.
- Owned Media–Owned media is the most effective advertising format to increase your brand presence in the digital domain. Some of the most common examples of owned media are websites, blogs and other social media channels. Here you have complete control of your property and the medium is unique to your brand.
- Earned Media–Earned media is your instrument to direct people to your owned media sites. Imagine having a website or a blog that no one is visiting! You need people to visit your owned media sites and interact with it. Earned media is akin to the traditional word of mouth, only in its digital format that comes with online mentions, shares, recommendations, reviews, reposts, that have the tendency to go ‘viral’.
The biggest incentive offered by earned media is the hybrid result of robust rankings on search engines and content contributed by the brand. A good SEO strategy combined with the benefits of earned media can place your owned media and content sites in a spot to receive higher engagement and far more visibility.
Benefits of Facebook Advertising
When we are living in an age where a ‘Friend’s’ likes, updates and reposts are prioritised over business pages, the Facebook overhaul is but expected! Facebook advertising offers to effectively extend your brand’s reach beyond an organic placement in the newsfeed. Over 1 billion users means infinite targeting possibilities.
Where the ads can be placed on Facebook
Facebook advertising allows you to place adverts in 6 locations
Image Source: http://www.kollimited.com
To summarize the benefits your business can reap with Facebook Advertising:
- The sheer demographics and statistical data available on Facebook allows businesses to reach out to people based on age, gender, location, interests and more. So you can really refine your audience targeting and reach.
- Facebook advertising is a great way to start for entrepreneurs and small businesses on a low budget. Others with lesser budget constraints can promote their adverts on the best emplacements, can have page post ads and sponsored stories, yet for much less price as compared to the organic adverts in newsfeeds.
- User is paramount on Facebook and their goal is to give best user experience. Hence, the Facebook marketplace is an auction system. Competition with other advertisers increases with the price. The Quality Score method ensures that the ad with the best performance wins as against the ad with the highest bid.
- Businesses can use Facebook pixel to track actions of users viewing their ads. Simply navigate to Facebook Pixel tab in ads manager and add it to the pages of your site.
- Facebook insights provides you with rich data about your page, your post and your target audience to analyse your performance. This analysis can be useful to you when you are deciding on future posts.
Have you warmed up to Facebook Advertising yet? If so, we would love to hear from you and if not, we see no reason for you to nut take the plunge. Do write back with your views and experiences.
Author: Srividya Y
