1) Ads Targetting Friends of Fans Double Your Ad Performance!

We learned from Facebook that the often overlooked ‘advertise to friends of your fans’ feature performs significantly better in terms of brand lift than regular Facebook ads. Why? If you advertise to the friends of your fans every single person viewing your ad will see that someone they know is already a fan of your brand (for example, if my friend Sally Baker is a fan of Bob’s Burgers the message ‘Sally Baker is a fan’ will appear beneath the Bob’s Burgers Facebook ad when I view it). As has been demonstrated many times before, people respond best to personal brand and product recommendations from their friends (in fact, a recent study by Morpace Research found that approximately 68% of Facebook users said that a positive Facebook friend referral would increase their chances of purchasing a product or visiting a retailer), so if every person viewing your ad campaign sees that at least one of their friends is associated with your brand the response will be dramatically higher. Now, you might be thinking ‘I only have 100 fans – if I advertise to friends of fans I won’t reach anyone’ – but keep in mind that on average each Facebook user has 130 friends. So if you advertise to friends of your fans and you have 100 fans you will be able to reach 13,000 of their friends. If you have 10,000 fans you’ll be able to reach 1.3MM of their friends!Additionally, a recent study by research and consulting firm Morpace found that approximately 68% of Facebook users said that a positive Facebook friend referral would increase their chances of purchasing a product or visiting a retailer. That is a very convincing statistic to support the effectiveness of advertising to friends of your fans.

Advertising to friends of fans is easy. When you set up your ad campaign on Facebook just select the “Target users whose friends are connected to” option (see screenshot below as an example).

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2) Keep Users in Facebook for Best Results

While you can use a Facebook ad to point to anywhere on the web, your advertising will be dramatically more effective if you point to something within the Facebook site, like your Fan Page. Imagine yourself in the shoes of a user– you’ve come online to engage with your friends, profiles, photos and feeds and have become interested in an ad. But once you click, you’re removed from your Facebook experience and taken somewhere completely outside of it. Unless the new location you’ve come upon is especially compelling, or in some way satisfies the experience you came to Facebook to achieve, many users will immediately drop off the advertised site and return to Facebook. If, on the other hand, you point your Facebook ad to feature something within the network, the user is far more likely to engage with it. Many Facebook advertisers make the mistake of directing their ads to landing pages that have been optimized for Google AdWords, not Facebook. Even if you’d rather direct consumers outside of Facebook, keep in mind the reasons they’re in Facebook in the first place and direct them to a landing page that is consistent with the fun, social, authentic and engaging nature of Facebook.

3) Targeting “Likes & Interests” with Facebook

Facebook ads enable you to target consumers according to highly specific demographic and geographic information. But why stop at age groups, location, or gender? You can make sure that your ad only displays to people who have explicitly stated somewhere in their profile that they share a particular “like” or “interest” that aligns with your ad.

For example, in setting up this sample ad for the Chocolate Bakery not only can you target US females between the ages of 25 and 55 (the target demographic for the Chocolate Bakery), you can also target people who list the following ‘likes’ in their Facebook profile: “chocolate cake,” “fudge,” “cookies,” and “chocolate”. Facebook shows that over one million users fit this very specific set of criteria so that’s one million sets of highly targeted eyeballs to potentially reach with your ad!

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4) Brick and Mortar Business? Get Local with your Advertising!

If you have a business that is in a brick and mortar location or primarily serves customers from a certain region, you can drill down to very specific location targets with Facebook advertising. You can even get as close as a 10 mile radius of your city! Now that’s localizing.

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