If you are serious about growing your Facebook fan page and attracting new people, you have probably run Facebook ads, or at least seriously considered it. You know that everyone is on Facebook, so it must be a good place to attract new fans to your page, and ultimately new business. You also know that Facebook is making it difficult to attract fans organically, showing your content to a smaller percentage of your fans than before. If your current fans don’t see your posts, how are they going to like, comment and share them, exposing your fan page to their friends?
Ads seem like a reasonable solution. But like any strategy, Facebook advertising should be carefully considered. Here are a few pros and cons of running Facebook ads.
Pros of Facebook Ads
- You can attract more fans on the most used social network. Let’s be honest, ads work. If you are willing to put up some money, you can get new fans to your page. If you are an established company, you can attract fans to your page even faster.
- Facebook ads are relatively inexpensive. When compared to advertising on LinkedIn or Google, Facebook ads are typically much cheaper per click.
- You can target very specific segments of the population. This is perhaps one of the best reasons to run Facebook ads. Facebook knows a lot about its users, and you can leverage that as a marketer to target ads to a very specific subset of the population. For example, if you want to run an ad that targets only women in their 30s who live in a particular city who enjoy knitting, you can do that. There are a lot of different parameters you can set to target your ad to your specific customer. This can save you a lot of money.
Cons of Facebook Ads
- You are investing money in fans on a social network. I don’t believe that Facebook is going away anytime soon, but simply having fans on a social network won’t always translate to leads or sales if your page isn’t also being properly managed. You can have a million fans, but if you don’t ever update your page, you won’t reach any of them. Additionally, if you have a million fans, but create really bad content, you will lose those fans. Having a properly managed page with quality content is vital for having success with Facebook ads.
- You might be able to get better results on other social media channels. What is your end goal with running ads? How do you measure your success? If it’s more social media followers in general – could you get the same result on a different channel without having to resort to ads? Maybe you can build a larger fan base on Instagram than you can on Facebook. Or, if the end result is more clicks to your website, maybe you could write a blog and share it on Pinterest instead? There are a lot of different channels that can give you the same or even better results than Facebook.
- Facebook ads cost money. This might be stating the obvious, but Facebok ads cost real money, not money in the sense of lost time, but a legitimate, out of pocket expense. If you don’t know how to run the right kind of ad, or don’t know the best way to get your ads to work, you can burn through a lot of money in a short amount of time. Or worse, you could misrepresent your company by creating a poor ad and then showing it to a lot of people.
If you need help running a Facebook ad, or have questions about running social media for your business, we are here to help. Comment below with a question and I will get back to you with the answer.
Also, if you want to stay in touch with Katie Wagner Social Media, please connect with us on Facebook.
Photo credit: @vallytina
