If you’ve been on Facebook lately, you’ve no doubt come across some form of advertising. You may be less familiar, however, with the different types of Facebook ads/advertising options. And, if you’re just starting to think about promoting your business on the largest social platform on the planet, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to give you a short overview of each of the Facebook ad options to match the right ad to your desired results. So let’s get to it!

Currently, Facebook provides three different advertising options:

1. Traditional Facebook Ads

Most of us have seen them on the right-hand side of our news feed and our profile pages. These are the little pieces of magic that have taken Facebook to the dominant level of social media advertising.

2. Promoted Posts

Available for both Profiles and Pages, Promoted Posts allow you to pay to push your most important posts higher in the news feed. This provides a better chance that your audience will see them.

For Profiles, you can promote your posts to your friends at a cost of $7. Additionally, other connected friends can promote a post you wrote. They’ll pay for the promoted post and you’ll get notified if they do so.

For Pages, you can go outside the confines of just people who like your page, and promote posts to the general masses of Facebook. The cost is based on the total potential audience your Page can target, and will vary from Page to Page. Here’s an example of the cost for the VerticalResponse Facebook Page:

3. Offers

Facebook Offers allow your business to provide discounts to customers when you post an offer on their Facebook Page. To claim an offer, recipients just click the “Get Offer” button when they see it on Facebook.

Facebook then sends an email with redemption details for the offer. Redemption of offers can be in-store only, online only or a combination of the two.

Now that we’ve reviewed the three types of Facebook ads, which provides the most bang for your buck? Well that’s a tricky question because it depends what you want to accomplish.

If you want more interaction on your posts and in turn, more “Likes” to your Page, then Promoted Posts are your best bet. This is especially true for businesses using Promoted Posts because the posts show up in the news feed of people who have not liked your page in addition to those that have. This provides an excellent opportunity to expose your brand, products or services to a new group of folks that are unaware that you exist.

If you have a “special” that you want to promote, either online or in your storefront, then Offers are for you. Offers can get people to go to your website or visit your store. And even if your offer isn’t the perfect fit for a particular shopper, it provides an opportunity to expose your additional inventory to a potential new customer.

Finally, we come to Traditional Facebook Ads. These traditional Facebook ads once moved the needle in regards to more Likes and/or traffic to websites. But our involvement with them over the last year has seen a huge decrease in value. If you’re still inclined to give them a try, start with the CPC (Cost Per Click) option instead of the CPM (Cost Per Thousand) option. The ads are still being served up to millions of people on Facebook, but many users have become desensitized to them. So you don’t want to be paying for something that’s not benefiting you. You only want to pay when they click your ad.

We hope this has provided you some food for thought about which Facebook ads will best for your needs. Which type of ad will you try? Already using Facebook ads? What’s been successful for you so far? Let us know by leaving a comment below or on our Facebook Page.

© 2013 – 2018, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.