“Facebook is only for old people.”
Ever heard someone (a millennial perhaps) say this before?
Many people believe that Facebook is an old platform that is no longer used by the younger crowd. Although the dominant age range on Facebook skews higher than any other platform, research has shown that this statement is not particularly true, and that Facebook is the best social platform to reach the most amount of people of all ages. A study conducted by Pew Research in 2018 shows that there are still quite a significant number of users under the age of 29 active on Facebook. According to the study, 76% of 18-24 year old’s and 80% of 25-29 year old’s are active on Facebook.
Why is Facebook so great?
From the commercial standpoint, Facebook helps businesses big and small to hone down and connect with the right people at the right time and place. They have an endless number of features and capabilities that advertisers can use to find their perfect audience for their business.
Here are six of the many great things that Facebook has to offer for advertisers.
1. Easy to Use
Advertising with Facebook is super easy as they guide you through step by step on how to create your own campaign. There is a significant number of informational videos and articles available at your fingertips to help you create your ad campaign and provide you the best practices on how to get started.
2. Clear Objective Settings
When setting up a campaign, Facebook allows advertisers to choose an objective for their campaign to get started. The objectives are categorized into three sections: awareness, consideration and conversion with specific objectives listed under each category.
Awareness
- Brand awareness
- Reach
Consideration
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App Installs
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Messages
Conversions
- Conversions
- Catalog sales
- Store visits
Choosing the right objective for your campaign is critical as it determines how Facebook will optimize your campaign and what your success tracking measure will be.
3. Ability to Target Milestones
Facebook has many targeting parameters, allowing the advertiser to find the exact customer they are looking for. One of the most unique features of Facebook’s targeting is its ability to target audiences by milestone. For example, Facebook can target based on those who are recently married, pregnant, have children, etc. because people are sharing these milestones in their posts. Facebook also has a lot of information on the users based on their profiles such as age, gender, relationship status, languages, education, and more.
4. Large Breadth of Data
Facebook primarily collects data in four different ways:
- Users’ activity across Facebook companies and products
- Users’ activity with other businesses
- Users’ activity on other websites and apps
- Users’ location
Facebook collects information through behaviours and interests such as page likes, organic post content such as photos, text, videos, and as mentioned previously, important life events like when someone was engaged, married and so on. They can also acquire data from advertisers that upload their own customer data or from their data partners such as Spotify.
5. Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel collects traffic on individual users on a business’ website. The pixel shows how a given user navigates through your website and retarget those users that are close to the end of the purchasing funnel. For example, Facebook can track a user that has visited your site, puts a product in the cart but does not commit to completing the order. Facebook can take this information and retarget them on Facebook.
6. Ad Formats
Lastly, Facebook has a wide range of ad formats that advertisers can use to engage their audience. Here are few great ad formats that Facebook provides:
- Image – as with many traditional advertising platforms, static images is an ad format that can be used on Facebook.
- Video – in addition to static photos, advertisers can use video to engage their audience.
- Carousel – showcases a set of 10 images/videos or less in one sweeping carousel ad.
- Collection – highlights product images with a cover and several featured images from your product catalog targeted to each individual.
- Instant Experience (formerly canvas) – highlights your brand through a mobile friendly full screen experience that opens after someone clicks on your ad.
Facebook collects a ton of information on one individual user and categorizes them into groups for advertisers to easily target. There are many great features on Facebook that any business can utilize in order to better reach their targeted audience (including millennials).