At last count, more than two billion people use Facebook, those users are highly engaged with content posted on the network: more than 800 million people like something on Facebook every day.

Of course, when it comes to getting the most bang for your advertising buck, too large an audience can actually be a bad thing. After all, you only want to pay to expose your brand to people who may be interested in doing business with you. Fortunately, Facebook offers several targeting options, allowing you to focus your Facebook ads on the right audience for your business to maximize ROI.

We'll get into the details of Facebook ad targeting later in this Blog, but for now keep in mind that Facebook's large global audience combined with the ability to target your ad by demographics, location, interests and behaviors allows you to access the exact people who are most likely to want to purchase your products or services.

Need more convincing? Consider this: 95.8% of social media marketers worldwide said Facebook provides the best ROI of all social platforms.

Facebook advertising is highly effective

According to an eMarketer study, 96% of social media marketers consider Facebook to be the most effective social media advertising platform.

In recent years, social media advertising has become a very popular marketing channel. This is because it is one of the most effective paid advertising channels, which helps to obtain new leads and convert them into paying customers.

Facebook ads work for both B2C and B2B businesses, and there are so many success stories showing more than 5x increase in marketing results after advertising on Facebook.

If you think it's too late to jump on the Facebook advertising bandwagon, don't worry. There is continued growth both in terms of new Facebook users and advertising opportunities.

Social media advertising budgets have doubled worldwide in the last 2 years, going from $ 16 billion in the US in 2014 to $ 31 billion in 2016.

In 2017, analysts forecast an overall 26.3% increase in spending for social media ads.

As reported by TechCrunch, the number of daily active Facebook users increased by 18% to 1.23 billion people in 2016.

You can reach your perfect audience

As of January 2017, more than one billion people see an ad through Audience Network every month.

Add to the equation the people who view your Facebook news feeds and Instagram accounts, and you understand the number of target audiences available through Facebook advertising.

Of Facebook's 1.6 billion monthly users, the average person spends 50 minutes a day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. That's more than on any other social network. With Facebook Ads, you'll have the opportunity to reach every one of them.

Facebook target audiences are highly customizable, allowing you to target people based on their interest, demographics, location, actions on your website, engagement on your app and more.

This makes Facebook the best advertising network for creating granular target audiences with a high ROI.

Types of Facebook ads

Facebook offers 10 campaign objectives based on what you want your ad to achieve. For each of these objectives, you can choose various ad formats based on your chosen objective and target audience.

Before we dive deeper into the topic of the benefits Facebook can generate for you, let's take a quick look at how different types of Facebook campaigns align with business objectives:

Application installations: encourage the installation of your mobile or desktop application.

Brand awareness: introduce your brand to a new audience.

Conversions: get people to take a specific action on your website (such as subscribing to your list or buying your product).

Engagement: expose a post to a wide audience to increase the number of likes, comments, shares or photo views; increase your page likes; promote an event.

Lead generation: get new prospects in your sales funnel.

Reach: expose your ad to as many people in your audience as possible.

Product catalog sales: connect your Facebook ads to your product catalog to display people's ads for the products they are most likely to want to buy

Store visits: take customers to physical stores.

Traffic: direct traffic to a specific web page.

Video views: show your video to a large audience to increase brand awareness.

Advantages of Facebook Ads

• You can get more visitors to your website or online store.
• Get conversions (user purchases).
• Increase engagement of Facebook sites to get more likes, comments and shares.
• Increase the number of fans of your page.
• Give more visibility to promotions and offers of your ecommerce products.
• Show the ad to those users who pass by your store or store.
• Promote events on Facebook.
• Increases the number of views of a video
• Promote specific products that they have already been interested in before (they have visited your online store before).
• Get more downloads of the application you have created.
• Increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter.

 2 Simple ways your local business can increase sales with Facebook

1. Commitment first

Your #1 goal when posting on your page is to get your followers' attention and get them to interact with your posts. If you fail at this, you will probably fail at running your page. Sure you want to market your products, and yes, you also want people to click through to your website.

But this requires:

• Fineness
• Know how to
• And yes, a little bit of luck

Remember: people don't want to be sold to all the time. They will allow you to sell to them sometimes, but only after a relationship is built.

Start by publishing interesting content, including:

• Photos
• Facts
• Questions
• Fill in the blanks
• Links to interesting and inspiring articles

Build trust with your followers and get them talking in your posts. Then, once you have built this relationship, mix in posts of links to your products or website.

Remember: with the way Facebook's page algorithm works, your followers only see posts from pages they interact with.

For example, in Post Planner, we make sure that only 50% of our posts are links to our blog. The other posts are created exclusively to get fan engagement, so we can make sure that ALL of our posts continue to show up in our fans' newsfeeds.

If all you post is sales content, eventually engagement will die, and you'll just be talking to yourself.

2. Show your products

I am focusing here on small local companies, those that have tangible products.

The power of suggestion is very strong on Facebook, especially with images that ignite people's senses and passions.

Many small business owners get their first burst of Likes by inviting friends and family to Like the page, either by:

• Publishing interesting products
• Inviting friends through your page

This is great, as long as your family and friends are potential customers who interact with your publications.

You don't need to have people like the page who will never engage, and in fact, having too many unengaged fans will hurt your page in the long run.

I have pages that I will never recommend to my friends, because they are not the target demographic of the page.

As a small local business, the best way to get "Likes" is to use the Like feature of promoted pages on your page.

(Again I am talking to small local businesses here not global companies or digital product type pages).

Use this feature on local pages and get great results, both an increase in "likes" and sales related to those "likes".

Facebook Ads is developed and measured in real time

In addition to recommendations, Facebook ads participate in all of the features of the real-time bidding systems. In this way, the control of ad performance is instantaneous. This will allow you to stop an ad in case you see that it is not working properly. Or if, on the contrary, you are getting the expected results, you will be able to give it a bigger budget.

Instant performance measurement also allows you to modify ads in real time, a great advantage if you want to improve their effectiveness. Your analysis tool, Insightswill allow you to measure aspects such as:

• How many users are interacting with your Facebook fan page.
• How many followers you have and how many you have gained in a specific time horizon. In addition, you can obtain information on the percentage of fans according to demographics, such as country, community, age or gender.
• What times are the best to reach your users.
• Segment the time period without limitations.
• The organic and paid reach, if any, of the publications.
• The trend of the "I like".
• The number of visits to the Facebook page.
• Analyze competitor pages or pages similar to your Facebook page.
• Analysis of all uploaded videos, with their corresponding metrics and parameters.
• Download reports of all site parameters in CVS and Excel format.

In short, Facebook Insights will allow you to determine how effectively your ads are performing.

It also offers virality based on users' own recommendations.

Part of the success of advertising on Facebook lies in one of the fundamental pillars of social networks. It is the recommendation. Especially that of the friends of the users you are impacting.

In this way, Facebook is looking for its ads to go viral. And, thus, be able to expand your reach among your fans' friends, a social component that gives greater credibility, relevance and power to this type of advertising.

Also, don't forget that Facebook has been the medium that has viralized the most videos, photos, publications and even ads. When people think an ad is interesting or simply like it, they share it. And it is likely that if that person has a particular type of taste, their closest environment will share some of them. So the same ad will impact that group of people as well. The fact that your ad is expanding will give you brutal possibilities.

The benefits for your company

At this point, most companies know that social media can bring huge benefits to their business. However, I am often surprised at how many business owners still have no idea how much can be done with Facebook Advertising.

Facebook ads run on the same pay-per-click / pay-per-impression idea as most online ads (re: Google AdWords). However, thanks to the amount of personal information in Facebook's database, they allow you to get ridiculously detailed with your targeting. Anything a user can put in their profile-age, gender, location, education, religion, interests, politics, job title, marital status, etc. -can be used as a filter for your ads.

Facebook ads work well for small businesses Because...

Facebook's ad targeting allows you to access any audience. With over 2 billion monthly active users, every consumer market imaginable is on Facebook. The social network is simply too big to ignore, but that's exactly what many small businesses do.

If you are ignoring the opportunity through paid ads on Facebook, chances are you have been burned in the past, and we get it, many advertisers have been. This is a common problem for many newbie advertisers, which is due to the fact that figuring out the basics of Facebook advertising is relatively simple. And while simple is often good, it's not in this case.

The ease and simplicity of Facebook's entry-level advertising products has created a problem: any motivated SMB owner can log on to Facebook and figure out how to boost a post. But using the standard "Boost Post" feature is not likely to generate significant sales.

This results in many amateur Facebook advertisers feeling like they just burned $ 5 here and $ 10 there for...what, some additional likes and impressions?

With $ 50 spent and nothing to show for it, many small business owners have decided that Facebook is the last place they want to spend their limited marketing dollars, but the fault is in the process, not the platform.

Even in 2017, there are many business owners who are skeptical about using Facebook Ads (or any social network, for that matter). But here's the simple truth: if you're a small business on a tight budget, Facebook Advertising is one of the most affordable and effective ways to promote your business. In fact, more than half of marketers say Facebook is the top social network they use.

Setting up an ad account is a relatively simple process. If you have a success story with Facebook ads, or if you have any questions about small business marketing, feel free to contact us.