Engaged in online advertising, or think you will soon? If you haven’t played with Facebook ads before, here’s a quick walk-through.

We’ll make this a practical example, where the goal of this exercise is to get more people to read this very article.  We’ll start by targeting people who may be interested in reading this and try to get them to subscribe to our blog or even link to it.

Let’s brainstorm a list of characteristics for those people: They’re based in the US, are at least 22 years old, have graduated college, and have expressed some kind of interest in entrepreneurship. Even better: maybe they have their own blogs, and maybe they’ll be kind enough to link to us after reading this post. We created an ad with those targeting criteria and pointed it to this article just as we posted it. Here’s a video showing how we did it:

As a side note to all those who read this after clicking on the Facebook ad: found this slightly amusing or interesting? Feel free to subscribe on the right.  Also, we know you enjoy blogging – how about a link from your blog to ours, done like this?

Hopefully we’ve shown how easy it is to get started and experiment with Facebook ads.  Coming later: a post about measuring the effectiveness of an advertisement. Let’s see how to tweak the data around how many new subscribers we got based on this campaign.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.