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Nowadays everything is becoming social. Everybody use social media networks to communicate, share stuffs, make friends and even to make money!

You should know that marketers always look for one thing: Masses. They analyze a market and study its potential depending how many people they can target and how many people could be willing to buy.

In the matter of marketing, there are many, but many factors you need to study before stepping forward. In this post I just want to talk about how you can use the traffic from social networks, specifically on Facebook to make money online.

Facebook’s Traffic is Huge

Do you know how many people visit facebook a day? According to Compete.com, Facebook receive over 100 millions of visits a month, which makes it an incredible place to run ads.

So now, I’m gonna step you ahead Facebook Ads, giving you my personal tips and thoughts about the system:

Creating and Ad

social media advertising

I don’t remember if you need to register or something like, but you can create an ad by going to the next link -> facebook.com/ads. Once there, you could see case studies and a step by step guide for creating an ad.

[tip 1] Selecting a Title is key for your ad. You have only 25 characters to write something to attract people’s attention, so do it well. This is something like Google Adwords, if you have created advertising before you know that you need to call to action within the title. Using verbs such as “buy, learn, get, celebrate… etc” (a.k.a. active verbs) is key to succeed.

About the content, this is the ad itself. You have only 135 characters so you need to think well how to write an interesting ad. Describing and complementing what you wrote on the title is the purpose of this field.

The other factor you need to consider is the photo. This is a 110×80 pixels image that will be shown in your ad. [tip 2] I highly recommend you to put a image with these dimensions; avoiding putting images such 80×80 or whatever. This is because facebook don’t center the image, so if you don’t use 110×80, your image will be aligned to the left, which leaves a white space at the right – which sucks!

Targeting

This is the most important step and the reason why many people fail with advertising. It is very important to target the right crowd for certain product or event. People tend to target large audiences, but that not always works.

Study demographics and psychographics of your market (i.e. real state, gaming, acai berry etc) so you will be able to configure the different  filters such as: location, age, sex, relationship status among others.

[tip 3] The more accurate your targeting is, the better. Don’t try to be flexible with the filters in order the display your ad to more people. That “extra” people you get by doing it, will not convert!

Campaign and Pricing

The next section deals with choosing a campaign to attach your ad to, and also, for setting your budget. You can choose between running your ad since it is approved or running it in certain dates, perfect for holidays such as Halloween or Christmas!

[tip 4] Choose Pay for Clicks in your ad (paying for impressions sucks, I’ll talk about it later). Facebook is gonna suggest you an interval for max bid. Do not care about it!! My experience says that setting a max bid lower than the minimum according to facebook works well. I’m used to set my max bid 20 cents lower than the min suggested by facebook.

Extra Considerations

Despite the great traffic of facebook, the clicks through ratio (CTR) sucks, so your goal is to improve it as much as you can!  That’s why I recommended you before to choose PPC as method of payment.

Also, they probably will reject your ad many times. The first time I used facebook advertising I got rejected like 5 times or even more, no kidding! But why? I have no idea, I was following their policies and rules so I think they didn’t like my ad.

[tip 5] I suggest you to create a couple of variations of your ads. In fact, once you get approved, continue creating variations of them. Then, see which one provides the greatest CTR, discard the others and keep the testing by doing other variations of the selected one. Then, the cycle repeats over and over until you get “the best” ad. Variations also include different pictures for the same texts!

I recommend reviewing: Suggested Best Practices and Common Reasons for Rejection, both sources of help provided by facebook.

Did I miss something? If so, leave a comment to let me know!