No matter you want this or not –  Facebook has changed our life. We visit this service every day – at home or at work, on the phone or on our laptops, but we do it.  That is why no wonder that many companies want to show up themselves on this social network. Unfortunately from some time we can notice that Facebook reaches are falling and this is connected with Facebook policies. How to deal with it? The answer to this question isn’t easy, but today we’ll look at advertising opportunities in this service.

Create your medium

Before we go to our topic, I want to pay your attention to one important issue. Before you create your fanpage, decide if you have enough time to engage your followers in it – without it there is no sense to create a business page, just to have it. Remember also that Facebook will come to an end one day and your target group can go to another service. What then? Apart from presence in social media it’s worth considering creating a website. Such a website is 100% yours and you can extend it freely every time you want. You can’t do this on Facebook and what if one day business pages will disappear from Facebook? You will leave with nothing, and you surely don’t want it. Create your strategy and realise it.

Boost your post on Facebook- is it really worth?

It’s worth at the beginning, just to learn something. However when you use “Boost post” you have limited opportunities of setting ads. When you click “Boost post” button you use a very limited version of ads manager, which is available on Facebook. If you already click this button, pay attention if your post is of a good quality. You’d better wait some time after posting and when first “likes”or comments  appear turn on your ad. Then you will get better efficiency.

How to start?

It’s the best to start from the basic rules that is: defining strategy and target group of recipients of your ads. Then you should remember about posting good quality posts – the ones that will engage your visitors.The next step is familiarizing with Ads Manager (there was Power Editor in the past, now both tools are joined). The same as in the case of Google AdWords it’s reasonably to start from small amount of money. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and experiments at the beginning.

What opportunities do we have in our manager?

When we start creating our ad we can define its objective. We can choose from the following categories:

1. Awareness
   1. brand awareness – reach people who can be interested in your brand
   2. reach – show your ad to the maximum number of people
2. Considerations
   1. traffic – send traffic to target place on Facebook, website, app or conversation in Messenger.
   2. engagement – get more people to engage with your posts and events, page likes or raise the number of claimed offers.
   3. app installs – encourage more people to install your app.
   4. video views – encourage more people to see your video.
   5. lead generation – collect contacts to potential clients (for example email addresses) from people interested in your business.
   6. messages- get more people to have conversations with your company in Messenger.
3. Conversion
   1. conversions- get more people to use your website or Facebook app.
   2. catalogue sales – create ads, which display automatically products from your catalogue  based on your target audience.
   3. store visists – promote multiple business locations to people who are nearby.

As you can see these actions are already oriented. Depending on what you need to promote, you choose one category and go to the next step, where you can find some similiar functionalities to those in “Boost post”. However here you get an access to some different options such as choice of placement of your add. Additionally you can choose from different platforms – Facebook, instagram, audience network and messenger. You can also choose a particular mobile system (Android , iOS) and directing ads to mobile devices connected only with Wi-Fi – it can be important in the case of for example video promotion.

Budget and ad schedule

Another section that we have here is budget and schedule. We can define here lifetime budget or daily budget and a date range of displaying your ads. Additionally we can create a schedule of ads displaying for every day seperately. If you promote some services, think if it’s worth displaying ads at night.

Create an efficient add

Then we go to the next step – creating an ad. We get here many additional options too.We can of course use an exisiting post on our fanpage or create another one. We also have here different formats. What’s important we can create some versions of an add for one campaign and check which one is the most efficient. You have here additional specifications so as to create the best quality ad. Additionally you can add parameters to the link to track conversion in Google Analytics or use the Facebook Pixel.

Summing up: remember – when you create an ad on Facebook do it really well. Don’t create ads only because you want to increase view rate of your posts – it’s ineffective. Set yourself a goal and realise it. Test different options and make experiments, and you will surely have better results.