Navigating the Levels of Facebook Advertising

Marketers spend more money advertising on Facebook than on any other social media site, but how they spend money differs from company to company.

The social network is the most popular among its competition, and its formulas for ads guarantees that they are cleverly targeted to users.

On Facebook, there are three levels of ads, including Direct, the biggest and most well managed accounts; Inside, for clients who spend less than the direct customers but still deal with sales representatives; and Online, the self serve channel, according to Ben Pickering, a Facebook preferred developer.

There are two types of ads on the site, stories and marketplace ads. Stories, or social ads, show that a friend likes a certain page, and other users can comment, share, or like it. The others are marketplace ads, in which marketers provide the copy and images to use on ads.

“According to Facebook, users want to engage with ‘stories,’ not ‘ads’—the difference being that ads are one-way communication and stories are more conversational and participatory,” Pickering writes. “To support this, they have presented data based on research done by Nielsen that showed significantly higher click-through and brand recall rates for ads that contained the social context of a friend’s name (i.e., ‘John Liked this’) versus a traditional advertising message alone.”

Facebook Premium allows account users to promote both page post ads and sponsored stories into their news feed. However, says Pickering, marketplace sponsored stories in the “Online” ad level may also be considered for this if they qualify in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.

Once users reach the brand’s page, marketers should remember to engage them with a call to action and by starting a dialogue.