Did you know that you can now promote your business on Facebook? With the explosion of Farmville, Mafia Wars etc, Facebook has truly become an online phenomenon. If you're familiar at all with Pay-Per-Click on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search or MSN adCenter (Bing…which is definitely on the rise as well), it works similarly on Facebook (go to the advertising link at the bottom of the www.facebook.com page (and yes, you need to have a Facebook account).
Go to the Facebook Advertising link at
the bottom of the Facebook page (once
you are signed in) to set up your PPC account. The ads are like "content" (or
contextual) ads on the other big PPC players. You are targeting (not so much by
keyword but rather) by geography and demographics of your target audience:
location, age, sex, interests, etc. And Facebook
has some pretty good data about their members! Plus, the PPC has a sort of an internal
viral thing going on…wherein an individual can automatically recommend an ad to other
friends.
The Facebook PPC service is not nearly as sophisticated (at least yet) as Google Adwords, but you get going pretty quickly (they do check out your ad, manually, before it appears). You can easily create a short ad (with image, description and link), set your bid (per click or 1000 impressions), monitor your impressions, clicks, costs and "conversions, budgets, etc.
I'm testing Facebook PPC for a client in Chicago right now, and it's already starting to take off. After a week, we have doubled the site traffic to approximately 80-100 visits per day. Please send me any comments that you have. account). Go to the PPC service is not nearly as sophisticated (at least yet) as Google Adwords, but you get going pretty quickly (they do check out your ad, manually, before it appears).