Facebook, Not Just a Social Network

About four months ago, we discovered that Facebook has a lot of great tools for small businesses. I’m talking about Facebook Pages. I remember a friend of mine on Facebook was constantly using his Facebook status to promote his business. Every once in a while someone would make a comment that Facebook was for social purposes, not business purposes. Now you can have the best of both worlds using Facebook Pages. Facebook lets you create a business page and attach it to your profile. This way you can promote your work without upsetting your friends. You may need to spend some time getting your friends to hit “like” on your business page, but eventually you can have the two be completely separate.

Facebook Ads allows you to create a small ad that shows up on the right hand side of Facebook Pages. You can target what geographical areas, age groups, and interests you would like to target. For example, we target people between Los Angeles and San Diego, aged 35 and up, and are interested in Art. That represents about 44,000 people. Every time your ad shows up, its called an Impression. A Click is when someone actually clicks on your ad. You can pay by the Impression or the Click. The great thing is, you can limit how much money you want to spend on your ad. We spend $10 a day. For $10, we average about 21,000 Impressions a day. We have ran our ad for 50 days and spent $500. For $500 we have had 995,925 Impressions, 1,125 Clicks and over 200 total strangers become a fan of Amy Pryor Fine Art. That’s $0.01 per 20 Impressions, $0.44 per Click and $2.50 per Fan. $2.50 to have someone see my updates on their Facebook Home Page is better than any other advertising I can think of. Maybe it doesn’t compare to ads on TV, but how much do those cost?

Don’t think of Facebook as just a social network. It can do a lot for your business. I’m excited to see just how far Facebook or Social Networking in general can go.