Facebook is like the girl next door that you may have overlooked, and it is now time to take her seriously. You remember back in 2004 when Facebook first made her entrance on the net, her growing years , braces and gangly look.
Well look at her now! Facebook has grown up and is a sophisticated, streamlined, sharp-edged social platform, with a huge following at her feet.
Let’s look at her most vital statistic – 900 million active users. No wonder the IM world is gushing at her feet, with new Facebook marketing ebooks appearing daily, and new Facebook apps, including marketing tools, being developed at a frenzied pace.
Lately Facebook has been rolling out a new look to her users’ profile pages, which encourages them to display their likes and interests. Even more exciting is the new Graph search, much like an engine search, but all related to what happens inside Facebook. The implications and applications of this innovation for the purposes of marketing with Facebook has not gone unnoticed by the IM world.
Keen marketers love Facebook’s demographics. Facebook gives advertisers the functionality to target specific audiences with Facebook ads. She is in control, but will allow you to set your daily budget and choose options such as CPM or CPC.
Facebook woos with visual impact, giving you free reign to choose your cover and your profile images. Ensure you maximise on this by using top quality graphics that will impact on your fans. Keep to fb stipulations, such as 20% text ratio on your cover image, or you may experience the sting of penalties!
Facebook has a set format for your fb ad, here again the image is the main component. These ad images are small [100 x 72 pixels] so maximise by color and content for visual impact. The idea is the image will catch the eye of the user so that it engages them and they will click on your ad.
Don’t be taken in by the simplicity of it all. Facebook does have an edge to her, namely, Edgerank, which is her alogorithm to configure what, where and when posts from your page are seen in your fans’ newsfeeds. You cannot out -wit Edgerank, but optimizing your posts and images will help. Images tend to get more coverage, for best results size them in proper dimensions.
So this is Facebook in 2013, all grown up and poised for even more clever sophistication in the future. Facebook has proven itself to be the number one social platform that every marketer can readily engage in to grow their business.
