Effectiveness of Facebook Advertising.

One of the main reasons for which Facebook advertising can be effectiveness for your business is that you can reach hundreds of millions of Internet users in one place. More than that, you have the tools to choose the people you want to advertise to according to many different criteria, in a way that it is almost guaranteed that only the people interested in your business will view your ad. This doesn't happen with Google AdWord advertising service, for example, where targeting options are a lot less limited. 

While many people complain about Facebook’s ever-evolving privacy policies related to users’ data, businesses can benefit tremendously from all the specific information available. Facebook uses the data that people provide and makes it available to businesses for advertising purposes. And Facebook users give away a lot of information, from where they live and work, their birthday, schools attended, to interests, hobbies, favorite movies and music.

If for example, you tell Facebook that you want to advertise to highly educated men, ages 20 to 35, living in France, who enjoy fishing, Facebook will show your advertisement specifically to those people. Of course, you can choose a broader target group. But by being able to design a target group according to various criteria, the chances of converting your Facebook advertising investment into profits will increase significantly.

When you create a Facebook ad, you can pick your target group according to location (country, state and city), age, gender, education level, relationship status, language, and likes and interests. You can choose your target group at step 2 during the ad creation process and once you select the criteria, Facebook will tell you how many people are in your target group.

As a whole, the study should be encouraging for Facebook. As someone who has never clicked on a Facebook ad in five years, I was skeptical. But the study contains empirical evidence showing that certain kinds of Facebook advertising, particularly earned media, can be effective. With nearly one billion users, Facebook has achieved massive scale, and thanks to “amplification” across such a huge network, marketing messages can spread to a degree unprecedented in the history of online media. Against the backdrop of a pretty dismal few months, that’s something Facebook can look forward to.