Facebook Advertising Worked For You?

Anyone who is in marketing should realize that facebook ads don’t work. The play for businesses on facebook is in owning a social media page and having people subscribe to it.

Basically it’s joining an opt-in list where the user has more control. It is much easier to control your facebook or twitter feed than it is to control the emails coming into your inbox. You don’t see anything that you don’t want to see (i.e. spam). If you decide to stop receiving offers from a business all you have to do is un-follow, but they can always check their page out again if they become interested again.

If your niche is dating, maybe it will work. But aside from that, I can't think of anything possible that would work with FB.

Incidentally, one of my clients asked me today about advertising on Facebook. The niche is a health niche with a very picky demographic and I wonder if she won't just lose money by buying ads on Facebook.

Interested in this question as well.

is it just the case that people don't use Facebook for searches?

What could i advise someone if they where interested in Facebook advertising but no real benefits?

It is very expensive though you can get targeted audience.

the best way for facebook traffic is making your facebook fan page and get subscribers
facebook advertising system is not good if you are planning to use this for IM purpose

I haven't heard anyone have success with paid advertising on Facebook. Any success I've had with Facebook comes from either meeting people in groups or pages and becoming "friends" and then offer what I'm selling or finding people that are in my niche and directly messaging them.

I do well with facebook ads to create traffic, I have seen no real measure of success as with money though.

I have heard alot of theory on this. I have seen the ads that say make a fortune with facebook. I know they think there crap doesn't stink and it cost's me more there for ppc than anywhere else.

I should write a book called how to make facebook and become poor.

Now I am not saying it doesn't work, what I am saying is I have not found a way to make it profitable for me.

I get facebook coupons though so my money I spend is not as much as it could be.

There is no immediate return on investment from Facebook campaigns. However, if you want to consistently build a strong brand rather than make a quick buck - you need to include Facebook into your marketing plan. 100 likes/followers is nothing, but if there're 10 000 of those and you share interesting content about your product and/or company/industry and keep your followers engaged, then FB starts to contribute to your brand awareness.

So it's like blogging - you need patience and dedication to build audience, but it will pay off in the future. The only downside is that your FB page does not actually belong to you and you can fall victim of changing FB regulations

My two cents.

If not paying for adverts then certainly a business/fan page should be active on facebook?

thank you for your comments

I'm in the self help/personal development niche and I have done a ton of testing with FB ads and I have found them to convert leads and generate sales very well for me.

I hear a lot of people saying they are bot clicks or whatever, but I can assure you at least from my own personal experience that the people on my list, and my clients are all very real people.

Agree with many people to create fanpage and one more thing is to build a list from it.

I tried and only gets target customers but no sale !
I don't know

I tried FB ads and they only worked to get more "Likes" for my page. I was disappointed.

Love it - and yea the only way I've found to get em to work is to buy likes for your page... but you can buy them so cheap it's ridiculous. Of course then you actually have to interact with them!

It won't work for everything and I've had lots of duds as well - but if you're building a site with really good information that people want to share with other friends who are interested in the same thing they can be really worth while.

If your looking to sell your product via Facebook ads then you are probably going to be unhappy with the results. Linking a FB ad to a website or sales page site is a bad idea. Conversions are going to be SUPER low and you will get no viral effect, which is the point of Facebook ads.

What you do with Facebook ads is something like this:
1) Create a fanpage for your product / service.
2) Create an opt in tab for your product on the fanpage .. have it like gated. Like gating should be something like .. "click here to get my awesome deal .. bla bla..."
3) Once they like you the page refreshes and they see the opt in form. Offer them something free that is related to your product or service .. a free trial .. or a free report etc.
4) The opt in ads them to your auto responder.

The point is this .. people get added to your auto responder for later marketing .. people have to like your page .. so all there friends can see the like and you get that viral effect of more and more people going to your opt in.

Have a look at our videos section on our webpage .. check out the 'More for less" video .. you can see what happened when we did a fangated opt in as opposed to directly advertising to our website. With a direct link we spent $20 and got 17 people .. with a fangated opt on on our fanpage we spent $19 and got 90 people. $19 for 90 people is only around 20 cents a person. For us 20 cents a person added to our mailing list is very profitable. Of course it will depend for you on the margin of your product.

First Social: Videos

It's really good when you create a fanpage and use fb ads drive people to your like gate. Keep them to be the fan of your page, keep communicating, keep talking. Then you can sell something later.

Facebook traffic is good for dating, game and music niches, for the rest it is absolutely useless traffic, when people need something they still go to bing of google to do their search... also FB ads are very expensive and even if you reach the right demographic most visitors are browsers not buyers....

You're better of with the search engines or buying ads on sites in the same niche, imho.

Here is an image of a test campaign I did last month.

www.yadatext.com/images/dog.jpg

71 clicks 30 likes 0 sales.

My web-stat program showed only 35 visitors yet Facebook showed 71.

I am answering to the facebook AD question.
Yes I use fan pages ect.
The ads though have not worked well for me at all.
A lot of people are talking about fan pages and such though.

I've used facebook ads in the past with success - however one mistake I've made (and many others make this mistake as well) is that I'll over serve my ads. Facebook ads are very different than search engine ads.

In search engine advertising you can find a keyword and ad that converts, and then just throw money at it. However in facebook, you may find a converting combination - but it is usually very short lived. Because facebook will continue to show it to the same audience over and over. You have to learn to watch your ads and know when to pull your ads before you overspend.

Again, the ads work... the thing is they work differently from what people are used to.

If you try to sell directly - they don't work.

If you use the ads to research your market and pull people into your sales funnel (starting from a free offer) that's when you have a chance to make money.

For most businesses that's just too much hustle that's why they don't get any results.