What I Learned About Facebook at Smx
One of the best sessions held at SMX was the Facebook session; about an hour and a half tutorial on how to use Facebook ads, and some new changes made to the platform (you can also read about it here). If you’ve been advertising on Facebook recently at all, most of it wasn’t breaking news, save for these three things:
- Users can now create ads for fan pages. Not only does the ad send the user to the respective fan page, the ad even has the feature of a “become a fan” button on the ad. This means users are only 1 click away from subscribing to your fan page’s updates. This is particularly helpful for clients like MyEstateManager, where lots of traffic is driven through the Facebook fan page. You’re probably thinking– “Well what about groups?” Sorry to burst your bubble, but Facebook is no longer giving support to groups. Also note that once fan pages reach more than 5,000 fans you can’t email all of them at once.
Ads for events are now available as well. This is especially helpful for people holding events that require paid registration, which allows the user to determine a cost per conversion, and properly manage their bids. Note that users subscribed to events can receive event messages, while users subscribed to fan pages can receive “fan page updates.”-
Facebook reporting is awesome. By going to the “reports” section of the self serve platform, anyone can generate a report that includes very helpful demographic data. This includes location, gender, and age breakdown, with respective click through rates.
By far the most helpful tip was to use the Facebook reporting, as one can now easily break down demographic data, while before users were just subject to estimated guesses in which demos to target. We’ve already begun using these features on enterprise clients such as California Pizza Kitchen and AmazingMail. These features are also perfect for our local clients, including a Boulder Massage Therapist, the Colorado Center for Photomedicine, and many others.
The Facebook Engineering Team Hard At Work
