Is Advertising on Facebook a Really Good Idea? The wonderful thing about the net is that it is loaded with options for small businesses to promote and attract brand-new customers. The disadvantage is that it is loaded with options for small companies to advertise and attract new business. The point being is that as with most forms of advertising there can be too many possibilities to choose from and for small business owners that do not have a lot of time or money to put towards marketing advertising in the wrong place can rapidly get expensive and if it is a failed effort then it can easily leave people discouraged and unwilling to try again. So to help make things much easier we'll be talking about the different methods to market a business over the net and main points about each particular opportunity. And the choice for today is Facebook Ads. Merely to be clear we are not discussing Facebook Company Pages. We're talking about the ads you see on the right side of your screen when you are logged into your account. If you didn't know it those little ads are the reason Facebook is worth so much money. Like Google, Facebook makes most of their cash from ad income. Actually billions of dollars are spent each year by advertisers that would like to reach Facebook's users and with hundreds of millions of people using Facebook it's a pretty big market that advertisers can easily reach. The Question though is whether it's a great way to advertise for small businesses? On the surface you may think so because it has such a large audience. But for a lot of small businesses you would be wrong. Of course now you want to know why? It actually boils down to 2 main reasons. 1. Facebook Advertisements are Interruption Based Take into account this, even though you can target the advertisements to show to a particular market using geographical targeting, demographics etc. the ads are still being shown to people that don't necessarily need just what you have to offer at that specific minute. It's the net equivalent of a billboard by the side of a freeway. And most people have actually come to be used to tuning them out because we see ads on many web sites. We don't even pay attention any longer. 2. Geographic Targeting Ok so Facebook has hundreds of millions of members. Let's slim that down. Say for instance you have a plumbing business in Nashville, Tennessee and your business only does business in Nashville. Well your audience just went from the hundreds of millions to 600,000 which is the population of Nashville. Now slim it down further by subtracting the people that
don't use Facebook, people that have accounts but aren't active, and so on. As soon as you narrow it down your target audience gets a great deal smaller. The internet offers a wide range of choices but for small companies with restricted budgets a great deal of them are a waste of funds and using Facebook's pay per click advertisements can be a big waste of money or at the least a huge waste of time for small business owners. Is Advertising on Facebook a Great Investment?, Is Advertising on Facebook a Good Investment?, Is Advertising on Facebook a Really Good Idea?