Facebook Ads Just Got Better for Internet Marketers

Facebook now lets you advertise to the friends of people who are already fans of you or your company. The social networking site rolled out “friends of connections” this week, which gives you an additional option when creating an ad on the Facebook Ads page.

This is great for marketers who target a specific niche and have a loyal following based around a certain subject area. This means that you can potentially gain more customers who want to buy your product or listen to what you have to say based on that their friends already being familiar with you. You could even set up a fan page based around an offer you come across on an affiliate network and then market directly to customers.

Right now you can only target friends of fans in Pages, Groups, Apps and Events where you act as administrator. Ideally, it would be great if you could target fans of any Page, but I’m sure this would get exploited and abused very easily. Ads would likely become irrelevant very quickly and the legitimate advertisers snuffed out.

In addition to harnessing the social graph by targeting your connections’ friends, every “Friends of connection” targeted ad promoting a Page or Event includes social content about a friend’s interaction with your business, amplifying the relevancy of your ad. Let’s take a look at an example. Annie is a fan of the Etsy Page. When Etsy wants to promote their Facebook Page, they can choose to target an ad to Annie’s friends by selecting the “Friends of connection” filter. Annie’s friends will receive the Etsy ad with the following sentence: “Annie Ta is a fan of this Page.” Annie’s friends are naturally more interested because Annie’s interaction with Etsy is showcased directly in the ad.

Now if only they could control how much people are paying these days for clicks, it would be virtually a flawless ad platform.

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