Facebook Advertising 101: How to Get Started With Facebook Ads

Are you considering running Facebook ads?

Have you tried Facebook ads but have had little success?

To discover how to run successful Facebook ad campaigns, I interview Amy Porterfield.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Amy Porterfield, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies and host of the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast. She's also the former Facebook community manager for Social Media Examiner.

Amy will explore what you need to know to get started with Facebook ads, plus you'll discover the benefits of running Facebook ad campaigns.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Advertising 101
How Amy got started in social media and Facebook

Amy became interested in social media when she was still in the corporate world. She worked for Tony Robbins for about six and a half years as director of content development. In that last year Tony got heavily into social media (he did his own Twitter), and Amy worked on Tony's Facebook page.

Amy got the entrepreneurial bug, and knew she wanted to go out on her own. She fell in love with social media and she knew that was the area to pursue.

While still in the corporate sphere, Amy started educating herself. She asked to be involved with anything related to online marketing and social media. About a year later, she took the leap and left the corporate world. Amy started by doing social media consulting, but eventually built a business around online training courses related to social media marketing.

Listen to the show to discover how Amy and I first connected, and our first experience at Blog World.

Why use Facebook ads?

Facebook does a lot to help marketers find their ideal audience online. Amy believes the targeting capabilities on Facebook are far more advanced than any other social media platform. Facebook allows people to get in front of their perfect audience on a regular basis.

Amy breaks down the Facebook targeting options.

If you've built up a Facebook business page and have a few thousand fans, start with targeting them. It's the cheapest way to target on Facebook, since you don't pay as much when you target your own fans versus a cold audience.

The next thing to do is create a lookalike audience of your own fan base. You tell Facebook that you have these fans, and you want to target people who are similar in likes, interests, activities and behavior. Facebook will give you an audience that's very similar to the one you've already attracted.

Then upload your email list to Facebook. Facebook will compare it to their database, and when they find a match, they put the contact in a bucket. This allows you to target people who are already on your email list with a new opportunity. Also, take that email list and ask Facebook to find a lookalike audience.

Amy adds a couple of other targeting options to the mix.

Target fans of other Facebook pages, such as your competitors or people who are aligned with your business. Amy says the reason she mentioned the other options first is that sometimes when people are first starting out and go to look for similar interests, they struggle to find Facebook pages to pop up.

For example, when you put together your ad, if you type "Amy Porterfield" in interests, her page will likely pop up, and you can target her fans. But a lot of pages won't populate, Amy explains. Facebook says it has to do with trending, activity, engagement and how many fans you have. Amy suggests trying to find five pages and target their fans.

Another one of Amy's favorite techniques is to re...