Facebook Advertising Advantages

Many small business owners are familiar with Google's pay per click (PPC) advertising platform, Google AdWords. AdWords is a very powerful way to drive highly targeted, motivated prospects to your business' website.

However, AdWords has grown has become a complex and competitive beast. While AdWords is still very much a excellent marketing tool for small businesses, it's not as easy or as relatively inexpensive as it used to be to run an AdWords campaign.

What you may not know is that Facebook has its own PPC advertising program. The program got a bad rap early on, but advertisers are starting to find it to be a very attractive option to drive prospects to their websites or Facebook Fan Pages. Here are 3 reasons that make Facebook PPC an attractive option, especially for small business owners:

1. Huge Numbers. Facebook has over 400 Million users worldwide. It gets 260 Billion (yes, with a "B") page views per month. It's estimated Facebook user spends about 7 hours per month on the site on average. Chances are your prospects are hanging out on Facebook, and spending a good amount of time there so it's a good place for you to be too.

2. (Relatively) Low Competition. Not many advertisers, especially small businesses, pay much attention to Facebook's PPC advertising program. What that means is competition isn't nearly as great as it is with AdWords and costs per click aren't as high. This presents a good opportunity for small businesses to take advantage of relatively cheap clicks before their competitors catch on.

3. Unparalleled Demographic targeting. This is the one that keeps me up at night thinking about the possibilities. Facebook has an incredible collection of demographic information about its users (think about the information you entered in your profile when you registered - college, martial status, employer, hobbies, etc.). Well all this information can be used by marketers to precisely target their ideal prospects.

Here are a few of the criteria you can use to target people: age, gender, marital status, relationship status (single, in a relationship, engaged, married), high school, in college, college grad, workplace, and more. Plus you can enter keywords which enable you to target people by hobby, favorite movie/book/music, etc.

Think about the possibilities. A Japanese restaurant owner can run ads for lunch specials targeting big employers nearby whose employees indicate they like sushi. A small business owner selling a green product who can target people whose favorite movie is the Inconvenient Truth. A jeweler who can run ads for engagement rings targeted to men "in a relationship."

The possibilities with demographic targeting on Facebook are very intriguing. Combine them with the (currently) low levels of competition and the huge numbers of users on Facebook and Facebook PPC advertising is definitely an option worth checking out for promoting your small business.

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