About a year ago, I didn’t care or desire to be on facebook and until recently not many of my peers were on facebook. Now, it seems everyone is on it. If you are looking for a friend on facebook, just friend me. It is pretty impressive to see a company grow from 0 to 175M registered users in a matter of 5 years and these users are spending an incredible amount of time on the site every month. This leads to a tremendous opportunity for advertisers and entrepreneurs. I admit I haven’t figured facebook advertising out yet, but given the sheer numbers on facebook, it’s only a matter of time before facebook starts becoming extremely profitable. So, for us entrepreneurs, it’s time to start playing the game early before the all the other advertisers arrive.

One of my good pals, DK has a great post on facebook advertising. If you’ve done some facebook advertising with success, please share in the comments below about how you’re thinking about advertising on facebook and what’s worked well. I’m going to share some of the things we’re going to consider trying on facebook. I’m very excited to try this out.

1. Test slowly on a small targeted group. I’m most likely going to target the younger demographic 15-34 since we’re running an entertainment site. Find your group, target age, gender, and location if you need to. Start a campaign on that small group.

2. Measure and Optimize. Watch your results closely and see if you’re driving good, converting traffic. If not, focus on ad copy and your site to make sure it’s converting. CPC’s on facebook are generally cheaper than Google, so you may find some great opportunities to pick up traffic.

3. Consider using CPC as a branding exercise. If you are paying for CPC and you’re getting 0.5% clickthrough, wouldn’t it be great that you would be also getting brand exposure on the other 99.5% of people who don’t clickthrough? Make sure your brand is front and center and that you are doing things that are relevant for the end user.

4. Consider the social impact/virality of ads. If you create a successful campaign, it will get pushed through facebook very quickly with people sharing and talking about your company/product. Find ways to provide value to the end-user and make it easy for them to share your story.

There’s a ton of opportunity right now especially with advertisers staying on the sidelines to be able to purchase advertising much cheaper than in the future which means you can build a business a lot faster now. Facebook is just one of many channels that are going to be huge for driving unique, valuable customers to us. If you figure it out soon, you’ll have a definitive advantage over those who arrive to the party late.

Good luck!

This post was written by Andy Liu, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Andy currently runs BuddyTV, sits on several boards, and blogs at InspiredStartup about staring and growing successful businesses.

Tags: facebook, online advertising

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 5:50 am and is filed under Marketing communications, viral marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.