Online marketing is a big business today. Various models are available to people who want to advertise their goods. Pay per click, pay per view and so on.

A way of gauging the effectiveness of marketing is how much traffic arrives at your site. Brand awareness is also a good way of measuring this, and social networking tools like twitter and Facebook are two very popular tools that companies use to build brand awareness.

Comparing the Different Options

As far as online marketing goes Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and Google sell adspace. While Facebook might trail the search engines on number of visitors, it is by no means a lightweight player.

If boasts over 500 million active users as of this year. Those are users that have pages there, and return to facebook regularly. 50% of those are active on their profiles at least once a day.

Let’s put this in perspective – by population Facebook has more people than the USA, 200 million more. Active users are more than the population of Indonesia – about ten million more.

Those are a lot of prospective clients.

The average user on Facbook has about 130 friends, so if you get 1000 people to “like” your product or brand, you have potential exposure to 130 THOUSAND people who know of their friends liking this.

The social aspect of this is important here too – People tend to value their friends opinions, so a “like” means a lot more in marketing value than a simple popup banner does.

Why Doesn’t it work then?

Advertisers complain that placing ads on Facebook are not as effective as placing a Google adword is. Why? Even if you even out ad impressions to negate the obvious advantage that Google has in traffic you get worse results on your Facebook ads.

The reason is actually very simple – People going to a search engine tend to be “on their way” to somewhere. Someone who is on Facebook is already where they want to be.

If you have a targeted ad in a search-engines results your visitor is more likely to visit your site. A search engine is a portal, not a destination.

If someone is on Facebook, however, they are already at their destination. Market research confirms this – people are loathe to leave Facebook. A targeted ad is mostly an annoyance, at best given a cursory glance.

If you read online you will see that Facebook advertising simply does not work for most people.

Click through rates of as little as 0.3% are common – and that is with ads who have millions of page impressions.

Does Facebook have a place in your online marketing portfolio?

Yes. If you use it right it can be very powerful. Facebook pages and groups are awesome marketing tools, but they are a lot of work.

You need to build one for a start, and getting a professional and visitor friendly Facebook Page can be a challenge. Then there is the upkeep of the page, and the interaction with your community.

Hard work, but the rewards are great if you persist.

With Facebook marketing the keyword is “presence.” If you can build an online presence and keep your audience interested there is a real possibility of business, targeted business, coming your way.

Summary

Online marketing is tricky. You have the potential of wasting a lot of money very quickly – imagine paying $0.03 per click and 8MILLION people click your ad! If your advertising is ill conceived or the clicks do not lead to enough business to cover the costs of advertising you stand to lose a lot of money.

If you want to do online marketing for your business, or build an online presence, enlisting the services of a company that specialises in this would be a wise move.