Web : How to Advertise on Facebook

For small business owner, there's no denying that Facebook's organic reach has declined. It's harder to get your posts to show up in your customers' News Feeds. But how can you give up on Facebook when almost every adult American has a presence there? According to Facebook, some 900 million people visit Facebook every day. You don't want to ignore all those prospective customers, do you? The good news: It's affordable and easy to advertise on Facebook. It's also a great way to get your business in front of a very targeted audience of prospects.

If you've never advertised on Facebook, don't be intimidated: it's easy to get started. Here's how.

First, visit Facebook's Ad Creation Tool. It will walk you through the process of creating an ad. You'll begin by choosing the objective for your ad campaign from a long list of goals, including sending people to your website, getting people to claim an offer or increasing attendance at an event.

Next, you'll be directed to select your audience. You can target who you want to see your ads very specifically based on factors including age, gender, location, employer, job title, interests, purchasing behavior and more.

You also have to choose a budget, which includes two things: setting a maximum total you want to spend either daily or for the lifetime of that ad, and setting a maximum amount you want to bid to have customers see your ad and take action based on it. You can easily edit your budget at any time.

You'll also choose what you want to optimize the ad for, such as visiting your website, website conversions or event attendance, so that Facebook serves the ad to viewers who are most likely to take that action. (Here's more information about all the ways you can optimize your Facebook ad.)

Then it's time to select your ad format. Basically, you can choose from two: News Feed ads and ads that appear in the right side of the feed. Right-side ads are much less expensive, but are also less likely to be noticed. News Feed ads are much more customizable and more likely to get noticed - in fact, many Facebook users will mistake them for regular posts.

Finally, you'll create your ad by customizing a headline, text, images and more. Need help creating your ad? Facebook offers a wide variety of resources and guides to help you. Learn more about Facebook Ads.

Once you've run a Facebook ad, be sure to monitor the results you get from it. Facebook makes this easy to do: Just go to the Ad Manager dashboard, and you can see how well your ad performed. By learning what works and what doesn't, you'll be able to adjust your ads over time to achieve even more success.

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Karen Axelton is Chief Content Officer of GrowBiz Media, a media company that helps entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses. Visit her company's blog at SmallBizDaily.com.