Whether you admit it or not, social marketing is the wave of the future. People flock to Facebook and Twitter every day to waste countless hours checking their friend’s statuses and playing social games. This is where the people are, and if you are not marketing to them then you are missing out. Facebook ads have never been simpler to set up, and this post should help you understand why you need Facebook ads as part of your social media marketing initiative.

Customization

By far the best part about Facebook ads is how tailored they can be to exactly the audience you are trying to convert. With other types of advertising you have limited control over the audience seeing the ad but with Facebook you have complete control. Say you are an outdoor company; you can set up an ad that markets only to users that have camping as an interest and no one else. If you are a bakery, you can market to customers only on their birthday and no other days. All of these things are as easy as typing in a keyword and checking a couple boxes.

Audience

Along with the above customization is the audience. You no longer have to market to the whole world, so you can make ads that will work with only the younger audience, one that works with an older audience, and one that works with the entire range. The ability to change in and out these ads and tweaking them to the desired result is what makes Facebook ads work so well.

Cost

The cost of Facebook ads is one of the main things you have to keep tabs on when creating ads. According to Facebook’s statistics, they have over 500 million users, half log in every day and 700 billion minutes are spent on Facebook per month. Essentially what this means is you will hit your daily budget every day, almost guaranteed. There have been less than a handful of days where I have not hit the daily budget I set as the impressions and clicks can be astronomical with this type of advertising. Make sure you set a daily budget when first starting out, so you don’t realize two days later that you have already blown through the social marketing budget for the month.

Experimentation

If you are working with a small niche when running your ads, make sure you think about other ways to market. If you only have a projected reach of 100,000 people, then within a month every single one of them could have seen your ad multiple times. Combat this by creating new ads on a monthly basis, which allows you to try different tactics to see what works best, while at the same time not annoying your customers.

These are just a few tips to help you in trying out Facebook ads. There are a lot of other options available but you simply have to try it and see what works for you. Set a low daily budget of a couple dollars, until you have an ad that is giving you the desired results.

What tips do you have to creating a successful Facebook advertisement?  Let us know in the comments below!

This is a guest post by Josh McNair from the Ecommerce and Entrepreneurship blog. Josh works for online home improvement retailer that sells plumbing supplies. Like them on Facebook!

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Guest Post By: Victoria Fortnum, Intern

Depending on whom you talk to, an internship can mean a variety of things. To some individuals internships are a necessity – the best, and sometimes, the only way to get your foot in the door of an industry in which you wish to pursue a career. To others they are hit or miss, some companies can be great and others… well, not so much. And then there are the “extremists” who believe internships exist for the sole purpose of companies being able to take advantage of students to do the work they don’t want to do; i.e. making thousands of copies and sharpening pencils.

Thankfully, my vision of an internship is still a positive one. I have not had to make a single photocopy or sharpen any pencils, however I was teased that I was going to have to change the water cooler everyday, but that’s a whole different story. With that being said, I have been fortunate to experience a preview of the ever-changing world of Internet marketing.

When I first came to Vertical Measures, I had dabbled in social media, and thought I had a decent understanding of the evolving world of Internet marketing. Almost immediately, I found out that my “understanding” of Internet marketing, hardly even began to cover the basics. Having to figure out the difference between link building through commenting and keyword searches, developing social media releases and editing articles created one big SEO puzzle in my mind. However, with some hands on training from great coaches, individual research, and some successful and failed attempts the SEO puzzle is beginning to come together.

With this being my sixth week at Vertical Measures, I have had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects for different clients. After the caffeine kicks in, I typically begin my day working on commenting. The goal of commenting is to increase link building by engaging in a conversation with other readers over a blog or article posting. Sounds easy, huh? Well with comment monitoring, page ranks and Not Do Follow it is much more difficult and time consuming then you would think! When my eyes begin to burn from scrolling through search quarries, I tend to redirect my attention towards article editing or promotional social media releases. Article editing puts my ASU writing courses to the test, while giving me an insight on how keywords are used throughout a piece as a marketing tool. Promotional social media releases are my favorite. They are like mini press releases that reach out to bloggers and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Typically they are informal, and allow me to go back to my social media roots, developing catching tweets and postings. Depending on the day and how busy the rest of the staff is, random projects, training sessions, or team meetings may be thrown my way as well.

The variety keeps me on my toes, and away from the copy machine. With a few more months still left in my internship I look forward and am eager, to see how the puzzle develops. I do recognize however, that in this ever-changing world of Internet marketing the puzzle will never be complete.

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Apparently, some people would. A few weeks ago, Britain’s Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, aka Fergie, reportedly tried to sell access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew. She claimed she could introduce the "undercover reporter" to Prince Andrew and could possibly dig up a signed photo. This business exchange was all caught on tape, to Fergie’s surprise.

1. Provide your target market with interesting information. By giving customers substantial content, you are giving them a reason to visit your website. Also, if there is often new content featured, it will give people a reason to check back.   
2. Increase page rank and help with other factors of SEO. Great content will certainly translate behind the scenes.
3. Drive traffic to your site. By increasing your page rank, more and more people will find your website through search engines. It is truly invaluable to be on the first page of search engine results.
4. Increase your chances for inbound links. If there is great information available on your site, chances are, people are going to link to it. These organic links also help with traffic and SEO. 

About the Author

Abby Gilmore is an internet marketing intern in our Internship program with a special interest in social media and internet marketing. She also blogs on the AZPRC and can be found on Twitter @abbygilmore.

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Your company has a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and you have made your LinkedIn page. Since starting, you have gained a pretty good following of your close friends and clients on all three networks. Now what?

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In case you’re still wondering if having a corporate blog will benefit your business, check out these quick 5 reasons why every company should have a blog:

1: Consistently publishing high quality of posts on your blog will establish your site as an authority in your industry which in turn helps you to build a strong bond of trust with your visitors and future customers.

2: Blogs have been shown to keep readers at your site longer. While they are there, they tend to consume what you have to read and interact with you and other visitors by leaving comments as well.

3: In conjunction with using RSS and email subscriptions, your blog site will keep visitors coming back. This makes it easy to lead a return visitor down the path of becoming a regular customer.

4: Search engines love sites to be regularly updated with fresh, new and on topic content. Your corporate blog will easily provide you SEO and content marketing benefits.

5: It’s also been proven time and again that the more quality content you produce regularly for your corporate blog, the more natural incoming links you’ll generate. And those links help your site rank higher in most search engine results pages.

Sound like a lot of work? It just might be; it depends upon the resources and availability you or someone in your company might have to devote to the company’s blog. If there’s just no one with the time or passion to dedicate to the continual operation of your successful blog, you have a few options:

Guest Bloggers

Don’t have time to write content on your blog on a regular basis? Think about opening up your blog to guest bloggers. There are many bloggers interested in blogging on different industry related sites. Why? Not only do they get to build up their own credibility in the industry, they’re also able to appeal to a whole new readership.

Outsourcing Content

By employing a quality business blog writing service you’ll be paying for content to place on your site. You won’t have to be concerned with hiring a full time, in-house writer that might only be useful for your corporate blog. Writing services tend to have networks of highly successful and experienced writers with expertise in areas that coincide with the industry your business is in. If the writer is good enough you might look at employing them on a regular basis to provide posts letting your readers know they are the author, and in turn help them to gain notoriety in your industry.

Partnerships and Regular Contributors

Know a group of experts in your industry? See if they’d be willing to work with you on building up your blog. Ask them for regular posts and contributions to the blog, see if they will help promote as well and gain readers/subscribers. You’d be surprised how many people are interested in contributing on a monthly basis to a blog.

Interview

If you’re well connected in your industry it doesn’t take much time to contact your friends and colleagues, ask them a few questions, and post answers to those questions on your blog. This gives you a lot of room to play with regarding blog topics, content for your site, and also can help gain publicity/readers.

Now you have no reason not to blog on your own site. Simply not having the time is not a valid excuse. Get out there and start your corporate blog today!

What advice do you have for ‘new’ corporate bloggers?

About the Author: 

Steve Lazuka is the President of Interact Media, a website marketing company based in Ohio. Follow Steve on Twitter, @SteveLazuka, to learn more about his business blog writing service, content marketing, and SEO.

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