How to Grow Your Fan Base on Facebook
Facebook is starting to become a real behemoth for online advertising. Comscore recently reported that Facebook controls about 8.2% of the total number of displays ads served on the Internet. That equates to just over 67 million unique visitors viewing these ads. A major chunk of this come from social ads, those banners you see on the right of the Facebook page.
These effectively help direct traffic from one part of Facebook to another part of Facebook, usually to an advertisers fan page. If you need more convincing that this model works, you would be interested to know that Facebook makes about USD$200 million just from these social ads alone. All this is driven by brands appetite for building a social presence on Facebook, via their fan page.
Having fans on your page is just half the challenge. Keeping them engaged, growing the numbers and effectively getting them to love your brand and what you do is a whole different ball game. Which is why I was relieved when I recently received a copy of the Building Facebook Fandom ebook from Ryan Lim, Business Director at Blugrapes. If you wish to download the article, you can get it from this link.
Building Facebook Fandom is a dead simple and easy to read article for anyone keen on getting their brand on Facebook and building loyal fan base around it. The article covers simple concepts from understanding your end goal on why you are doing a fan page to ways to target your demographics and get them onto your page. I wanted to zoom in on one specific section of the article which I think makes the platform interesting for advertisers, which is the how to do targeting for your social ads.
Social Ads Targeting
Social ads targeting allow advertisers to tailor who sees the ads based on various adjustments.
Physical demographics – This allows advertisers to specify if males, females or both genders view their ads, along with the age of the audience.
Geography – Adjustments here allow advertisers to target audiences in specific regions.
Keywords – Based on the report, the keywords option is not very useful since most Asian users generally do not have a habit of updating their preferences beyond their initial account registration.
Connections – The connections options is particularly useful as the ads will only be exposed to users who are not already fans of the advertiser
Timing Effects on Social Ads
Another interesting section covered by the report is timing effects on social ads. Due to the social nature of the ads, the timing that they are served plays a huge impact on the effectiveness of the campaign. Here’s some interesting insights to time status updates on Facebook as written in the report:
10am to 12pm: Pre-lunch. This is when most users will view pages before heading off to lunch
4pm to 6pm: Before returning home. This is a short break to recover from the possible fatigue of work prior to returning home.
10pm to 12am: Pre-bedtime. Before most folks go off to bed, they take comfort in knowing what has been happening amongst their circle of friends.
And here’s some periods where brands should not reach out to consumers.
Weekdays 6am to 8am: Travelling to work/school.
Weekdays 6pm to 8pm: Traveling home.
Weekends & Holidays: Out of home. Most folks should be taking a break from their normal routines.
The information above is definitely susceptible to debate though. I spend quite a bit on my time on Facebook during the weekends :)
Nevertheless, Building Facebook Fandom is definitely a good read. It may not make your brands awesome or anything on Facebook, but it is definitely a good starting point resource to have.
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