Facebook Ads vs Promoted Posts
Facebook Ads vs Promoted Posts: A Side-by-Side Comparison
Targeting your audience on Facebook is not only painful, but confusing – especially if you want to go down the ‘organic’ path.
Hey, I can’t blame them, as any business with interested
parties and dollar driven investors want return on their profits. So
whilst I don’t agree, I can understand why Facebook has made it
difficult for business owners to connect with their followers unless you
show them the money.
Understandably, several individuals are unhappy with this new paid
approach, including Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban, who was
extremely vocal when presented with a price tag of $3,500 in order to
promote a message from the Dallas Mavericks Facebook Page to their
followers.
FB is blowing it ? This is the first step.. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new Myspace as primary site twitter.com/mcuban/status/…
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) October 27, 2012
But with over 1 billion users, Facebook’s juggernaut position (which
is essentially a monopoly) allows them to impose these monetary
protocols, so for now, we’re stuck with playing by their rules.
So there are two key methods of advertising your business
on Facebook: the standard Facebook ads and the more recent introduction
of Promoted Posts. So let’s observe the two options and determine which
will suit your business.
Facebook Advertising
This is easily the number one method Facebook relies on to
generate the bulk of its revenue. They allow you to place paid ads which
are then displayed to your targeted audiences.
When you establish an advert, you can narrow down your audience by
using demographic factors such as age, sex, location etc. But that’s not
all, you can even go down to specific interests such as whether you
want them to like ‘cooking’ ‘gardening’ which Facebook then uses to
estimate the size of your target audience. The number of individuals to
whom the ad is actually served depends on your budget and there is no
guarantee that anyone will click on your ads.
Like Google, Facebook allows you to set a budget so you
don’t blow a couple of hundred or thousand within the first few days.
Your budget can be as low or high as you want and Facebook also commits
to helping you achieve your advertising goals by displaying your ads to
the most relevant audience.
So let’s summarise the Pros and Cons of advertising:
As you can tell, the advantages clearly outweigh the
disadvantages, however, you should still be mindful of a couple of
factors. Given the cost effectiveness of establishing Facebook ads, the
platform is infiltrated with a number of ads and as a result – some come
across as spam. Secondly, ads are a distraction and some of the savvy
web users have discovered a few methods to block these ads.
Despite these minor issues so to speak, Facebook ads are
definitely an effective medium for advertising especially since the cost
per click is significantly lower than what you would pay with Google
Adwords, plus it’s a great way to generate ‘likes for your business.
What if you already have enough likes? Well, let’s turn our attention to Promoted Posts then…
Promoted Posts
Think of Promoted Posts as something which is in between a standard
post and an advertisement. The concept is straight forward, you select
the post you want to promote, and just click on the ‘promote’ button
next to the ‘comment’ and ‘share’ buttons.
The promoted posts will occupy up to a third of the news feed making them very visible. Take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of Promoted Posts:
As you can see the advantages overshadow the disadvantages
making this a good method for getting your message out there. The lone
caveat I will add is that you require a following / likes to see any
real benefit from this method.
Comparison between Facebook ads and Promoted Posts
So now that we’ve analysed the two methods of advertising, which one
is better for your business? Well, that will depend on the situation. So
here is the overall summary between the two:
Although both options have their advantages and work
equally well, it all comes down to the environment and what you’re
trying to do. If you have minimal likes, start off with Facebook ads to
develop likes and get targeted followers. Once you’ve got a fan base
going, start to use your Promoted Posts to show off your events,
promotional offers, news and given you have targeted followers, these
readers will be inclined to read the post and even share it across their
network.
So, what’s your favourite method of advertising on Facebook – Ads or
Promoted Posts? Have you tried either of these methods? I’m keen to hear
your success stories or feedback on how one method works better than
the other.
Are you Ready to start for facebook marketing? Get in touch with us via our Contacts.
Source: http://socialmouths.com/blog/2013/05/14/facebook-ads-vs-promoted-posts/
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Social media is one of the most widely used methods in order to reach right audience. Thanks a lot for sharing all of these details about FB ads and promoted posts. Keep posting such details. I also need the traffic to my new travel blog so would like to hire the expert facebook ads Los Angeles team. Hoping to find a good one soon.
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