Facebook Advertising
Facebook advertising is one of the most effective ways to reach people in your area interested in Ayn Rand. In fact, Facebook will even tell you how many people meet your criteria before you spend a penny!
Why Advertise an Objectivist Club on Facebook?
- Facebook is currently the most popular website in the United States (more popular than Google.com). More than 1/3 of all people in the United States are active users on Facebook (~120 million). In short, most of the people you want to reach about your Objectivist club are already on Facebook.
- Facebook allows you to show your advertisements only to those people who meet certain criteria and whose profiles contain certain keywords that you choose. For example, you can specify that the only people who will see your advertisement are those who live in Chicago and have any of the following keywords in their profile: "Ayn Rand", "Atlas Shrugged", "Fountainhead", "Anthem", or "Objectivism". Facebook will also tell you in advance how many people match your target criteria! It is quite refreshing to know that there are five, ten, or fifteen thousand people within your chosen radius that are fans of Ayn Rand.
- Facebook lets you spend as little or as much as you want on advertising. There are no minimums you have to meet and no long term commitments. You can easily try it out and increase spending only as much as you feel comfortable and as the results are justifying. For example, the Chicago Objectivist Society (COS) spends about $30 per month on advertising. In the first 5 months of COS advertising on Facebook we had hundreds of people from all over Chicago click our advertisement and 75 of them filled out an "introduce yourself" form requesting an invitation to one of our events.
How to Start
- Facebook ads are attached to a Facebook account. If you will be the only one managing the ads then you can login to your account and create them there. If you think people may jointly share the responsibility, you should create a special Facebook advertising account.
- If you're already logged in, go here: http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/ Or, if you want to create a new account be sure to log out of your Facebook account before clicking that link. It will prompt you for a new login & password at the end of the process.
- Designing your ad:
- Destination URL: Instead of linking people straight to your homepage, ideally you should create a special landing page with a sign up form targeted specifically at people clicking this ad.
- Title: For the Chicago Objectivist Society we use both "Interested in Ayn Rand?" and "Chicago Objectivists"
- Body: Our current body is, "The Chicago Objectivist Society hosts many events each month for people interested in Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism"
- Image: We use this cover of Atlas Shrugged (right-click and select Save As to save to your computer) - Next type in your City and for Likes & Interests we suggest: Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living, Anthem, Objectivism, Objectivist, Atheists, Atheism, Libertarian
Note: On the right-hand side you'll see a number that updates showing you how many people meet your criteria. - Lastly, on Pricing, start with $10 as your Daily Budget
After you start running your ad be sure to check in first thing the next day, you don't want to forget about it and let it run for more days then you were planning. After the first day check to see how many clicks your ad received and how much it cost you per click.
There is lots more we could say about Facebook ads but this is a basic overview to get you started. We have not yet done much testing of different ad titles, descriptions, and images. It's very likely that there is something which would perform much better than what we suggested.
If you have additional questions or if you have lessons you learn yourself, please contact us!