Facebook lets you buy ads that show on the right side of a user’s main page in Facebook. They don’t cost much, and are easy to target to specific audiences. For example, you could create an ad that targets only 20-30 year old women in your zip code.

If you’ve considering buying ads on Facebook, you may be interested in a recent study by the Nielsen Group. They looked at ads by 70 different companies and discovered that ads that include social advocacy are 2-4 times more likely to be clicked on, recalled or to lead toward a purchase.

What does this mean to you?

Social Advocacy is like “word-of-mouth”. When you purchase a Facebook ad, it automatically lists any of the viewer’s friends who are also fans of your business (fans are customers and your friends who sign up with your business to receive your new posts on their wall). Like word-of-mouth, customers are more likely to believe ads recommended by their friends.

How much more likely? When compared to normal homepage ads in Facebook, ads with friends in them showed the following improvements:

• Click-through rose from 1% to 4%
• Ad recall rose from 10% to 16%
• Ad awareness rose from 4% to 8%
• Purchase intent rose from 2% to 8%

In other words, if you’re going to purchase ads on Facebook, they will be much more successful if the viewers see their friends are also fans of your studio. If you don’t have a lot of fans to start with, you’ll have to accept that the ads will generate low results until you collect enough fans to show up on their friend’s ads.

Remember, people in Facebook have friends, and businesses have fans. If you’re using your personal account for your studio, you need to create a business page so it can start collecting fans.

To build a list of fans, you can offer a free gift like Kraft Foods did on Facebook, or you could even trade your photography for fans.

The bottom line: Facebook ads can work for your studio, but adding your fans to ads will turbo-charge their effectiveness.

Tags: facebook

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 6:10 pm and is filed under design, marketing, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.