Las 10 reglas del avisaje en Facebook

NewsCloud es un proyecto financiado en parte por la Knight Foundation y que busca darle vida a aplicaciones de información (no necesariamente de noticias) dentro de Facebook u otras redes sociales. Por ejemplo, Hot Dish, proporciona información sobre el cambio climático; Minnesota Daily es un sitio para generar noticias sobre la Univesidad de Minessota y Seattle In es un aplicación de los estudiantes de Periodismo de la universidad de Washington, que incluso tiene herramientas multimedia que pueden ser vista directamente desde Facebook. Los 250 millones de usuarios activos de Facebook abren un camino que recién está explorándose. De hecho, la estimación de ingresos (US$500 millones)de la firma de Zuckerberg fue una sorpresa para todos los analistas estadounidenses. Más allá de la experiencia de NewsCloud, la publicidad (que coquetea más osadamente con las redes sociales que los medios) ha descubierto un número importante de características que es valioso seguir de cerca. Facebook tiene su publicidad asignada a once factores de orientación (edad, sexo, ubicación, palabra clave, relación, etc) y sobre esa base abre una extraordinaria posibilidad de construir marcas, una relación profunda con los clientes y fidelizar a través de diferentes estrategias, como son los contenidos. Tal como lo explica el siguiente artículo, los 10 pasos para entender el avisaje en Facebook, son finalmente los pasos para crear relaciones robustas con nuevas y viejas audiencias.

1. Facebook Is Least Effective At Direct Sales
If you’ve come to Facebook looking for instantaneous sales than you’ve come to the wrong place. Facebook presents businesses with the opportunity to reach their target market throughout the entire marketing cycle. While a small percentage of users are ready to purchase while they’re browsing Facebook, a much larger percentage of users are going to make a purchase in the future if not now.

2. Create A Greater Volume Of Ads That Target Less People
Often times on Google, advertisers will create an ad which targets every person in a single country and then split test two ad versions against each other. On Facebook this model will do nothing but cost you money. Placing a generic ad that’s targeted at an entire country, without any additional targeting, will do nothing but get you a lot of clicks and waste a lot of money for the most part.

3. Friend Users Before You Sell To Them
Facebook is about relationship marketing, not direct sales (as I described in the first law). That means it’s more important to build a relationship with a potential client or an existing customer rather than closing a sale right away. So how does this law show up in practice? The most obvious form is through the Facebook Ads for pages and events.

4. Understand Your Market
On Google, a shoe retailer will develop an advertisement that targets people who are “looking to purchase shoes”. These advertisers will look for people who are carelessly misspelling a word while searching for something in order to convert them into a customer. It’s a great model for generating one-time sales but unfortunately these advertisers don’t always understand their market.

5. Set Advertising Budgets With A Goal In Mind
It’s extremely easy to spend a lot of money on Facebook advertisements by “experimenting”. I can’t tell you how many people I know that have aimlessly spent thousands of dollars on Facebook advertisements but couldn’t point to tangible goals that they had accomplished. If you set a budget on a campaign for $20 a day you should know what you would like to receive for that money.

6. Monitor Your Ad Performance And Adjust Accordingly
Now that you’ve defined your goals, it’s time to track whether or not you’ve achieved them. Throughout each Facebook advertising campaign, you should be tracking how well the advertisements perform. Are you on track to reach the goals that you’ve set? Are your advertisements achieving a reasonable click-through level?

7. Test Landing Pages Versus Facebook Pages
In traditional online advertising, users are directed to a landing page from which they are prompted to fill in information in a form. This information is then typically used to send marketing literature. On Facebook, you want to build relationships but if the relationships you are building aren’t generating any revenue, you may want to diversify your advertising strategy by including some landing pages.

8. Split Test Ads By Demographic
An advertiser once told me that women tend to react more often to advertisements that have the color pink in them. While I doubt this is consistent across all women, this could be true for a large portion of them. The only way to find out if it is true is to split test different ads within that specific demographic. I’ll use an example to illustrate this rule.

9. Develop Creative Ad Copy
This honestly has to be one of the most important laws. Conversion is primarily about two things: your ad copy and the landing page. If your advertisement doesn’t provide a call to action, there is a good chance that the user won’t respond. Facebook ads for pages and events already provide a call to action but generic advertisements don’t. If you offer the user something for clicking, there’s an increased chance they will click.

10. Don’t Over Target
In the eighth law I outlined how the more that you target, the more you can begin to hone your ad copy. While increased targeting can increase click through rates, determining how to most effectively target sub-segments of your customer population can be costly both in time and in money. While you should most definitely take advantage of Facebook’s targeting features, it’s more important that you get your company’s name out there and then build the relationships.