10 Reasons Why You Need to Pay for Advertising on Facebook

Having read Danielle’s "Social Media is more than just "LIKES"" I felt a counterpoint on her view of Facebook advertising was needed. It invoked a strong reaction from me as I believe it ignored the fundamental strengths that Facebook has engineered into their advertising product. I reached out to Danielle and offered a counterpoint which she happily accepted.

So here are ten reasons why Facebook advertising is important. Why you should and need to spend money.

1. EdgeRank limits your fan engagement
   On average only 12% of your Facebook fans will see your posts; a decrease from the 16% Facebook reported pre-IPO. To get around this you need to advertise to your own fan base.


2. Spreading the goodness of true engagement
   Sponsored stories help you spread real engagement. A brand should pay to highlight great engagement to a wider network. Engagement is a central component to measuring the effectiveness of content. By spreading engagement, you make it an efficient way of spreading word of mouth, and often endorsement of the brand.


3. Reach
   Do you think your page has got it going on? If you love your content then Facebook adverts are the most efficient way of getting more people to see it. It’s no different from driving people to your website using Google or Banners.


4. Frequency
   Advertising hasn’t changed so much that you can create enough virality from a single post that suddenly people will come flocking. It’s cheaper to frequently reach your fans and a wider audience through Facebook advertising than it is through content and it delivers in a more timely fashion.


5. Re-activation
   A limiter of EdgeRank is the affinity score with your brand to each individual. Facebook advertising offers a way to get around this. So if you have an app role out, advertise it to your fans to get them re-engaged and increase affinity scores for future content.


6. Targeting
   What the Beeb did wrong was ignore the real value of booking adverts in Facebook. Yes Facebook has a huge audience but that misses the point. Micro-targeting is the real asset.
   
   It’s the data declarations from fans of where they live, what they are interested in, who their friends and family are and even when their birthday is that makes Facebook powerful. It’s not billions of fans, rather the 50,000 really, really strong targets meeting your criteria that provides gold.


7. Media integration
   Facebook sits at the awareness and interest level of the pipeline phase so it cannot operate alone. And for purchase funnels to work they have to operate at some scale and be consistent in creative delivery. It isn’t always possible to have creative consistency in content on Facebook due to their rules of audience engagement. Advertising on Facebook however, does provide this option.


8. It isn’t always about engagement
   While the most effective use of Facebook advertising is to drive to the Facebook page, it doesn’t preclude driving people from Facebook to a different destination. And sometimes it works really well.


9. Money vs. Time to achieve propensity
   Studies are now starting to agree that brands Facebook fans are more likely to purchase than people who are not fans. A well-targeted, consistently optimised campaign using Facebook advertising has a greater opportunity to deliver fans faster as it has greater reach than your posts. So why not get them faster? It may mean they purchase sooner.


10. If content isn’t seen, does it truly exist
    If the creative isn’t strong then the media will not work as well. If the media is poor, great creative doesn’t get to be great. In Facebook, a lot of creative ideas happen but without an initial push they fall flat because no one sees it. Content without media is one hand clapping.

Photo (cc) Joe Wolf