Advertising through Facebook is a new and unique opportunity to reach literally hundreds of millions of potential users, customers and friends. Depending on your target audience, Facebook has tools that permit you to isolate these users and show them ads relevant to their interests (which should match with your website or business). Making an ad on Facebook is easy but mastering the art of effectiveness is much more difficult. These five tips will help you begin to maximize your advertising dollar.

Check Out the Competition

You can input certain interests for your Facebook profile (as a user) so that you end up in the same categories of interest as your site will be targeting. This will allow you to see any ads that are being specifically targeted to those interests. While not all ads you see will be targeted toward these interests, you should easily be able to determine which ads are appearing as a result of your targeted interests. This gives you the opportunity to see what other competitors are doing and the tactics they are using to target specific audiences.

Create Various Advertisements

Much like any serious advertising effort, you will want to create multiple advertisements for your campaign. Why would you want to do this? For starters, the subtle psychological elements of advertising can be effective; having multiple advertisements with different images and text can all be received differently among an audience, even if the ad is for the same product or service. You can also deploy various ads to different demographic groups, measuring the rate of response among each.

Nocturnal Deployment

Through observing various Facebook advertising campaigns, the knowledge that ad campaigns do better during the evening and night hours has been determined. While no reason for this is known, it has been proven again and again; rather than wondering about the reason, simply take advantage of the situation. Try to deploy your advertising campaign between the hours of 9 PM – 4 AM for maximum efficiency. Also, keep in mind that there is typically a younger demographic online during the evening and at night.

Popping Aesthetics

Images make the Facebook ad, so it is vital that you catch people’s attention and make a great first impression. This is the only difference between various ads; the text in all ads is a uniform font and format, with the image appearing to the left of the body text and the link being shortened in the header (For URL shortening services, try Pingler’s URL Shortener). This image should be relevant to your target audience and to your product; bright colors are recommended to draw the reader’s eyes away from the main Facebook page and onto your ad.

Get Local

If your product, service, site or offering has a local connotation to it, use Facebook’s geo-targeting options to find the users most inclined to use your ad. Many make the mistake of advertising at-large when their target audience requires the ad to be more precise. You can refine by country, state, city or even ZIP code (with a radius option available as well). A well-placed local advertising campaign may have anywhere from 1,000-50,000 people in it; Facebook shows you the target audience based on the selections and refinements you make when creating the advertisement.