Is Social Media
the Way to Go

for Small Business?

by Jim Dougherty

Having freshly researched the online advertising possibilities for several clients - small to medium sized local businesses - we’ve learned a few things. Primarily, we focused on Facebook and Google Adwords, making some interesting finds when comparing the two possibilities for Pay-Per-Click ads. We found that while Google AdWords may be a good choice for larger companies with bigger advertising budgets, FaceBook seems more flexible and less expensive overall to experiment with when thinking about targeting your online audience.

What you need to have before creating a Facebook ad campaign:
Step to Facebook Advertising
(graphic courtesy of Facebook)

Facebook ad strategies vary widely in complexity. While you can get pretty complicated with online ad campaigns, sending click throughs to funnels and/or specific content on landing pages within your website, you can also simply create offers, and make educated guesses to target your FB audience. Then you can track your results. It’s always important to understand clearly what your goals are from the outset, and really plot out and plan for your desired outcome, whether that be click-throughs to your website content, phone call inquiries on services, direct purchases, or sign-ups to your email list to name a few possibilities.

An important part of using social media is to create an audience - Facebook Likes, Instagram Followers - and you do that by providing content that has value to people - specifically - to your target audience. Those who are in the market now or may be a some point, ready to become a new customer. Audience engagement on these platforms, is part of what you’re goal should be. On Facebook this can be done by writing posts, and boosting those posts. From your website you will want to add social media icons linked to your pages, and add the share icons to relevant pages of content so anyone can easily share on their own Facebook page. Before setting up your campaign, businesses should make sure their websites are well-designed, have relevant content and are easy for your visitors to navigate.

FURTHER RESOURCES: