Is Marketing on Facebook a Really Good Investment? The terrific thing about the web is that it is loaded with possibilities for small companies to market and draw in new clients. The downside is that it is loaded with options for small businesses to advertise and attract new business. The point being is that as with most kinds of advertising there can be too many possibilities to choose from and for small business owners that don't have a lot of time or money to put towards marketing advertising in the incorrect spot can quickly get pricey and if it is a failed venture then it can easily leave individuals frustrated and unwilling to try once again. So to help make things easier we'll be talking about the different ways to market a business over the net and main points about each particular opportunity. And the selection for today is Facebook Advertisements. Just to be clear we are not discussing Facebook Business 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 realize it those little ads are the reason Facebook is worth so much money. Like Google, Facebook makes the majority of their cash from ad revenue. Literally billions of dollars are spent each year by companies that would like to reach Facebook's users and with hundreds of millions of individuals using Facebook it's a very big audience that marketers can easily reach. The Question though is whether it's a nice way to advertise for small businesses? On the surface you might think so because it has such a large user base. But for a lot of small companies you would be wrong. Of course now you wish to know why? It in fact boils down to 2 major reasons. 1. Facebook Ads are Interruption Based Consider this, even though you can easily target the ads to show to a certain target audience using geographic targeting, demographics etc. the advertisements are still being shown to people that don't likely need exactly what you have to offer at that particular minute. It's the web equivalent of a billboard by the side of a highway. And a lot of individuals have come to be accustomed to tuning them out due to the fact that we see advertisements on a lot of websites. We don't even pay attention any longer. 2. Geographic Targeting Ok so Facebook has hundreds of millions of users. Let's slim that down. Say for instance you have a plumbing company in Nashville, Tennessee and your business just does business in Nashville. Well your audience simply 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 do not use Facebook, individuals that have accounts but aren't active, and so on. The moment you narrow it down your audience gets a whole lot smaller sized. The net offers a wealth of choices but for small businesses with restricted budgets many of them are a waste of money and using Facebook's pay per click advertisements can be a large waste of resources or at the least a big waste of time for small business owners. Is Advertising on Facebook a Great Investment?, Is Marketing on Facebook a Great Investment?, Is Marketing on Facebook a Great Idea?