Spark Notes Summary of Facebook AdvertisingFacebook advertising is a very powerful tool when used correctly and to its full potential. But in order to understand why it is so powerful we need another medium for which to compare it by. We will use search engine advertising as its comparison.Search engine advertising provides an amazing opportunity for businesses to reach their target market. For health clubs search engine advertising could promise a great ROI because you can pay to advertise only to those individuals who are actively searching for a health club to join in your area of business. For example lets say you own a health club located in San Diego. If you pay to advertise for the keyword phrase, “gym membership in San Diego” then every time somebody types that phrase into Google or Yahoo, you will be a top search result. In other words you are paying to advertise only to those people who are already interested in the service you offer. It can’t get much better than that? Or can it?Now let’s consider Facebook advertising. Facebook advertising is similar to search engine advertising except that it is several times more specific and therefore several times more powerful. With Facebook advertising you don’t pay for a top search result instead you pay to advertise to a specific type of person. With Facebook ads you can advertise to people based on their gender, age, location, marital status, interests, and friend affiliation! Advertising by friend affiliation may be a marketers favorite tool of the bunch because you can essentially advertise to Ron’s friends. (For this example Ron is a member of your gym) Having the ability to market to Ron’s friends is a huge bonus because consumers are likely to trust the products and services that their friends also use. So with a little bit of research prior to your ad campaign you can effectively advertise to the exact type of person that would be interested in joining your gym!

One of the reasons why Facebook was catapulted into the most popular social networking site that it is now is due its consistency with maintaining the overall user experience and making sure that every part of Facebook and everything that gets connected with it, including the ads, should contribute to the steadiness and uniformity of the whole website setup and the makers of this wondrous social site have been without fail committed to protecting the user experience by keeping the site clean, steady, consistent, and free from misleading advertising and they are able to do this by passing the strict regulations on Facebook advertising. So the whole Facebook advertising setup is generally hinged on transforming existing ads into more personalized messages that are cut to the form and liking of the individual users based on how their friends interact with music artists, brands, and all the businesses that are relevant to them.So Facebook has put in place a set of guidelines that applies to all ads that will appear on the website and even those ads within canvas pages of Facebook Platform applications and in addition to this, all ads are required to meet the terms of the Privacy Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities meaning all advertisements are subject to the rules of Facebook and the website reserves the right to reject or remove advertising that they may consider as going against the company’s ad policy. At the same time, the same guidelines may change at any point in time and Facebook can waive any of the guidelines written whenever it wants based on its discretion.One of the strict regulations on Facebook advertising that an advertiser has to always keep in mind is that nobody can create and/or manage different Facebook accounts for the sole purpose of advertising unless otherwise given the expressed permission by Facebook and in this regard, ads that contain a URL or a domain name in the body must link to the same URL or domain, not to any external website. At the same time, landing pages are not allowed to generate pop-ups, and this includes pop-unders and pop-overs, when a user enters or leaves the web page, or mouse trapping where the advertisers do not allow the users to use their browser back button and traps them on the site leaving them nothing to do but “x” out from the whole site altogether.Before an ad can compel a viewer to click on an ad and submit pertinent personal information such as date of birth, name, phone numbers, social security numbers, et cetera, the advertiser has to make sure that it is being done to enable an online purchasing transaction where the landing ad page clearly and succinctly indicates that a product is being sold. In short, hanky panky is not allowed.