by Matt Bird

Created on: August 02, 2011   Last Updated: August 03, 2011

Facebook's a multimedia giant. Bringing together all facets of online life - communication, entertainment, business, you name it - Facebook is, for many, a one-stop shop for online satisfaction. So what better place to advertise a product or service?

According to Inside Facebook and as of 2008, Facebook is growing by over 600,000 new users each day. That's 600,000 potentially fresh faces who may be on the site constantly. Add that to the already millions of frequent users and the potential for effective advertising is rather astonishing, as the typical Facebook user views the site a few times a day. The chances of getting your ad seen numerous times is quite high.

What's more, Facebook is geared towards targeted marketing. The days of advertisements bombarding people who would never even consider the services offered are more or less over. If you pay for advertising space on Facebook, your ads will go straight to the people most likely to consider your product. What better way to spend your money than to do so with effective advertising, even if the costs can be somewhat high at times?

All that said, Facebook is not strictly a for-pay advertising space - buying banner space is just the easiest way to go about advertising on this multimedia giant. More effective is using Facebook's pages to create entire advertising campaigns for your company, usually with an emphasis on social interaction.

Think about it for a second. Facebook is, for the most part, free. You have to pay for the component parts now and then, but making a page that advertises your service - perhaps in a roundabout way - doesn't cost a dime. Many companies have taken advantage of this fact to plug their ideas to a huge crowd, drawing thousands of followers (or 'likers', as the case may be) by developing fun, humourous ad campaigns. Look to Old Spice and Skittles for notable examples. And this isn't just a method for endearing large companies to consumers, either - thousands of smaller businesses have successfully plied their services for free on Facebook.

What makes Facebook so handy as an advertising tool is its reach. All you really need is one person to love your product to begin a domino effect. When they 'like' your page, that appears on their wall. All of their friends can see what they've liked. They in turn may like your page and dig your advertising pitch, and then their friends will jump on board, and so on. It's also easy to create a group or fan page that's geared specifically to your area of interest, so complete strangers will come out of the woodwork often to partake of what you're offering. And if you have campaigns on other social media platforms, you can easily link them to your pages on Facebook.

As with any form of advertising, formulating an ad campaign on Facebook - regardless of its form or target audience - is not always going to work. There are, for example, some services that just don't translate into effective social media campaigns, in which case you may want to try out more traditional forms of advertising instead. There's little risk in creating a Facebook fan page and seeing if you can attract followers, however, so why not give it a shot? At worst you may have wasted a few days of creative thinking that you can apply to your advertising endeavors elsewhere.

Learn more about this author, Matt Bird.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.