Target An Audience on Facebook – But Beware The Cowboys

Facebook  is the new frontier for everybody from individuals to companies, entrepreneurs, consultants and, recently, unfortunately, the online advertising cowboys. As in search marketing, any investment in social media marketing needs to be researched and then approached with clear goals in mind. And then it needs to be monitored and optimised. If you’re able to make it work for you, then Facebook’s millions of users offer exciting possibilities with potential ROI to blow your socks off.

Facebook advertising differs from traditional paid search advertising in that ad appearance is based on the user demographics rather than a matched keyphrase. Facebook’s  filtering technology is still in its infancy, but already your creative can be targeted to a specific age, sex,  sexual orientation, location, employer and job role amongst other things. Advertising strategies are still being developed and the metrics are new and need to be understood, but there is far less competition than for paid search and, understandably, advertisers are keen to give it a try.

But there’s a problem for us “white hat” marketeers. The cowboys are hot-footing it over to Facebook. Having found it increasingly difficult to create business with their sullied (to put it mildly) reputations in the paid search arena, the “grab yer money quick” outfits have repositioned and are about to attack social media platforms in the same way that they’ve sullied paid search for so many unsuspecting punters. It may not be “5 search terms for £99 a month”, but choose the wrong partner and clients will get as many clicks as they always have done … ie next to none. They will already be fine tuning their strategies to collect money without paying for clicks.

So do yourself a favour.  If you would like to adopt a social media strategy that will work, contact SearchVista.