Facebook’s 2 Million Advertisers

 Facebook's Advertiser Base Doubles 

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The number of Facebook advertisers has lept from 1 million to 2 million in the last 18 months.

Facebook is always trying to find new ways to modernise and open up their website to as many social groups and generations as possible.  Right now, the focus seems to be on businesses.

As many young adults are entering the adult world, having grown up with a Facebook account, starting a business on their reliable social media network will come as second nature. As for older companies who haven’t tried online marketing until now, who will they find first? Facebook: the most popular and accessible site of their time and their children’s time.

However, with Facebook increasing their business audience more and more every few months, it is questionable if Facebook really is the best way to advertise your business.

Facebook is known for its fickle nature. In 2010 its focus was on gaming. Some people signed up to Facebook just to be able to tend to their virtual crops and livestock on FarmVille. Then in 2014 there were over 93 million people playing Candy Crush every day, most of these were through Facebook. When Facebook bought Instagram it became an even bigger platform for photo sharing as well.

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So right now, advertising is where Facebook wants to excel. Since 2009, Facebook’s been trying to build a relationship with businesses, which was done through the introduction of 'Pages.' At first, all this did was encourage an onslaught of youths to create pages with vaguely amusing names whose main focus was to rack up the likes. Thankfully, they moved on and pages are now being used for the reason Facebook intended.

With a recent addition of a ‘Boost Post’ function available on pages, there really are no limits for businesses. Except you must have over 400 likes… and be willing to pay.

There are areas you can edit when boosting your post, one being budget. Basically the more you pay the more people you reach. 3 GBP will reach 1,200-3,200 on an average page with 800+ likes. At the other end of the scale, 99 GBP can reach up to 54,000 people on a similar page.  But this is for just one post and if you want it go for more than one day, and then you need to pay at least 1 GBP a day. However, allowing businesses to spend as little as 1 GBP a day, can be helpful for smaller businesses and budgets.

There have been fears that the traffic this feature brings to your page is not always legitimate; one business stated that although the likes on their page increased, the actual interests and locations of these people were not suitable for their product.

However, what seems important is to remember to edit all the settings that are available and make sure you’re specific with location and target audience, or you could end up wasting your money.

Facebook’s efforts have been impressive and although Google is still in the lead with over 4 million advertisers, Facebook has done in less than 3 years, what it took Google to do in five.  The fact that advertisers in Facebook are increasing at such a rate seems to suggest that this method is working.

Source: http://www.socialsongbird.com/2015/02/facebooks-2-million-advertisers.html