Facebook Ads and Beyond: What Marketers Need to Know

By Michael Stelzner
Published May 3, 2013

Do you use Facebook ads?

Are you wondering how paid Facebook marketing can work for your business?

To learn about Facebook EdgeRank and paid Facebook marketing, I interview Jon Loomer for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Jon Loomer, who blogs about advanced Facebook marketing at Jon Loomer.com. Jon used to do social media work for the the NBA and American Cancer Society before going out on his own in 2011.

Jon shares what efficient targeting means for marketers and the metrics involved.

You’ll learn creative ways to generate more business on a minimal budget.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!

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You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, Stitcher or Blackberry.

Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

EdgeRank and why it’s important

Jon explains how EdgeRank is the unofficial term for Facebook’s sorting algorithm.

You don’t see everything that’s published in your news feed. It depends on your affinity, your connection with specific people and pages, how you interacted with a specific content type in the past and the ‘weight’ given to posts.

The EdgeRank algorithm as described by WhatIsEdgeRank.com.

Over time, the older something is, the less likely that you’ll see it in the news feed. And in a perfect world, EdgeRank helps you see what you want to see.

You’ll discover as a marketer what you need to do to make sure your fans see your content and how EdgeRank can help you rise to the top.

Listen to the show to find out what you need to do to encourage your fans to act on your Facebook updates.

Facebook metrics marketers should pay attention to

As a marketer, it depends what your goals are on Facebook. Jon explains that he is a publisher, and when people visit his website, he makes money. So for him, the more traffic the better.

You’ll find out why Jon focuses on consumption and a stat called link clicks.

Jon explains that consumption is any type of click, whether it resulted in a story or not. It could be a comment, like or share, but it could also be a photo click, video play, link click or any other click. Remember Facebook records them all.

Facebook measures consumption and interactions.

You’ll hear an example of the post-level export lists for all reposts over a given time period. You can look at it post by post, posts that had the most consumption and quantity of clicks.

With a time decay on Facebook updates, Jon shares what you need to do to make sure you reach people in completely different time zones with your most popular links to help you reach a new audience.

Listen to the show to find out the best time to reshare a post, with time decay in mind.

Facebook targeting for marketers

Over the last few months Facebook has made it easy for you to target your updates to different audiences.

Jon explains there are two different forms of targeting. You can target your posts or you can target your ads.

You’ll hear why Jon is not a big fan of post targeting. Where Facebook targeting really comes alive is within advertising. Facebook constantly releases something new to make it incredibly powerful.

Facebook targeting comes alive within advertising.

On the Facebook advertising side, Jon reveals some of the newer things that Facebook has done with targeting.

Last year when the Custom Audiences feature was first rolled out, it allowed you to target your offline customer list with email addresses you’d collected, phone numbers or Facebook UIDs. These are people who have proven to subscribe to your content or bought something from you in the past.

Whether or not they are your fans, you can create ads that are targeted to these people.

You probably hear a lot about how you can’t sell products on Facebook, but Jon thinks there’s an example of an exception to this rule. You’ll discover what the example is and how it’s a good way to stay top of mind and drive relevant sales.

Listen to the show to hear what happens when you give Facebook your email list and why they don’t share that data with anyone.

Facebook Promoted Posts

Jon gives a quick background on why Promoted Posts are useful.

Apparently 10-16% of our fans see a given post. A Promoted Post helps you reach more of your fans who weren’t around to see your content when you first published it or who didn’t see it because they haven’t proven to care much about your content in the past.

If you’re a newbie advertiser, it’s easy to click the Promote button, which will automatically generate a campaign with 2-3 ads in it. However, if you are or want to be an advanced marketer, you’ll learn why Power Editor is the better option.

When you use a regular Promoted Post, you have minimal control over your targets. You don’t care who sees your post if it’s organic, but you’re pickier about who you are going to spend your money on.

Listen to the show to find out how to use your advertising budget more efficiently by not promoting to the people you don’t want to spend money on.

Why you should consider Power Editor

Jon explains that Facebook Power Editor is a Chrome browser plugin. If you like to split test and create many ads, this is a much easier way to do it.

Facebook Power Editor is a great plugin for split testing.

Whenever Facebook rolls out a new tool, they always go to their ads API first, which goes to third-party tools and Power Editor. The main ad interface, the sub-serve ad tool, often doesn’t get this as it’s dedicated to make it as simple as possible for the newer advertiser.

Within Power Editor, you can split test. For example, if you want to target mobile devices only, you can narrow it down to iOS devices and then make it only iPhones or only iPads. You’ll learn about the other split testing options available within Power Editor.

Facebook’s Partner Categories use data from select third parties, including Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom. These are three companies that have a whole lot of data on user behavior including purchases, demographics, how much money they make, whether they own a car, when they bought that car, etc. There are over 500 categories now and they are going to add to it.

Facebook's Partner Categories show you user behavior.

This data has nothing to do with the user’s behavior on Facebook. It’s their behavior on other sites and offline that counts. You can now target these people based on these categories.

You’ll hear Jon give an extreme example if you were a Ford truck dealership in Denver, Colorado.

Listen to the show to hear what you can add, which could potentially be extremely powerful.

How Facebook determines the cost

Jon says that it ultimately depends on your competition. You have 3 main options.

Cost per clickCost per 1000 impressionsOptimize cost per 1000 impressions

Within Power Editor, you have the option of either an auction basis or a fixed price. More often than not, people do it via auction.

You’ll hear Jon give an example of what a typical spend might be for different types of clients, and how your competition, and bidding by CPM versus clicks, can impact how much you pay.

Carefully manage your advertising spend.

Listen to the show to hear which ads Jon has constantly running every day.

Matt asks, “I’m considering starting a blog or a website and I’m wondering how important you think it is to have a niche topic. Especially since it has a very focused audience, does it also have a lower ceiling for success?”

You bring up a really good point. With a blog, you can target a very broad audience to try to attract more people, or you can go very deep and narrow to try to get a more engaged audience.

I strongly believe it makes sense to develop a niche. If you write about something that’s very specific, an area where you have a passion or that you want to explore, you’re going to get a much more engaged audience. They’re going to get behind you because this is something that they are very interested in.

You’ll hear two great examples from my experience with niche topics.

A niche is not a limitation; in reality, it’s actually a benefit.

Call in and leave your social media–related questions for us and we may include them in a future show.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how this works for you.

I want to share with you what an amazing experience Social Media Marketing World was. It was a gathering of some of the coolest people that you could ever imagine and the overwhelming response from people was: WOW!

While it’s awesome to connect with people on Twitter, a podcast or on Facebook, there’s something special about being able to meet the people you follow or interact with online. Social Media Marketing World was full of some of the most social people you could ever meet.

You’ll hear a clip from Cliff Ravenscraft, the Podcast Answer Man, of what his experience was like at the event.

So here’s the good news. If you missed Social Media Marketing World, we’re going to do it again in San Diego in 2014. You’ll hear more about it here in the coming months.

Ways to subscribe to the Social Media Marketing podcast:

What do you think? What are your thoughts on Facebook advertising? Please leave your comments below.

About the Author, Michael Stelzner

Michael Stelzner is the founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner, and author of the books Launch and Writing White Papers. He's also the host of the Social Media Marketing podcast. Other posts by Michael Stelzner »

http://www.jretechnology.com