You might be familiar with Google AdWords, the service that lets you buy or bid on certain search words and terms and have your add and a link to your site appear in the sponsored results section of a Google search results page. I’d like to suggest an alternative and perhaps better way of doing this.Facebook is known primarily as a Social Networking site but recently its been trying to open its site to Business users. They now offer an advertising section which can be accessed in your account by clicking “Advertise” at the bottom of the home page then “Create an Add”. You get to give the add a title and description and upload an image as well as provide a destination link to your website.
The most interesting thing about Facebook adds for me and the thing that sets them apart slightly from Google AdWords is the fact that you can target your adds to specific Facebook users based on Location, Age, Language, etc.. As you pick these filters the system continually refreshes the amount of people you can target based on your choices. For example I chose to target the add to people over 18, living in Ireland who speak English. This gave me a user base of 142,780 to market to! You can also use keywords based on the type of things people put in their Facebook profiles which is handy.
You can set a max daily spend and an amount per click just as in AdWords but the add you submit needs to be reviewed.
I’ll post results of my add campaign here soon..!
Reverb Studios Design 
Hi Leon, how is the Facebook advertising going? I joined facebook recently but dont know how to utilise it properly to promote my business yet.
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I was only trialling Facebook Ads really Geraldine, luckily for me I don’t really have to advertise most of the time, got enough work here. Of the 3 I tested, Facebook, Google AdWords and Linkedin Ads, I found Facebook to be the easiest to setup and run and while I didn’t get any work from any of the campaigns (at least I don’t think I did!) the Facebook stats were much better than the others.
PS – I found out the other day that there’s over 400 Carrick-on-Shannon related people on Facebook!
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I’m thinking about using facebook us a advertising solution. but i’m unsure how it will go. i run a Computer repair bussiness and i feel abit hit and miss about it.
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Well just give it a quick bash and see how it goes, can’t hurt too much. You can turn it off whenever you want.
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We will probably have the same add. I’ll race ye!
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Hi Leon great post. We have just started lookin at Facebook as an advertising platform. Let me know how it goes.
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