FREE Advertising on Facebook for Small Businesses

Facebook is offering free $50 advertising credits to up to 200,000 small businesses. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, believes that every small business should be using Facebook to help market their goods or services as it can “target every single person [that] they need to target at least once, and then they can grow their businesses from there.” Similar to advertisements placed on Google, each advertiser has a set rate that they have to pay for every click a user makes. Now the first $50 will be free to up to 200,000 small businesses.

Although advertising on Facebook is cost-effective and easy to use and implement, I don’t think it will be very proficient in results. Facebook is a difficult advertising channel because its core purpose is social networking. Most of the users’ time is spent on reading friend’s recent updates, posting status updates, skimming through photos, etc… As a semi-active Facebook user myself, my attention is rarely focused on the ads. It’s instead diverted to the center of the page –the news feed or a friend’s profile page.

In addition, a large segment of Facebook users are young teenagers and college/university level students. This market segmentation generally does not have the direct income to purchase various products or services. The advertisement could capture the user’s interest, but the whole transaction may not be completed.

I think the free $50 credit serves as a good trial and error experience for small businesses to experiment with advertising on Facebook. Through the free $50 credit of advertisement on Facebook, small businesses can monitor the amount of page impressions and clicks they receive, and evaluate whether their product or service is effectively reached out to their targeted audience.

Source:
Facebook offers free ads to draw customers

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