The usual PPC methodology employed by Google and Yahoo does not translate exactly to Facebook. Facebook is unique among social media tools because it is a site for individuals that also allows companies to establish a minority presence on their site using the Pages functionality. It is, however, first and foremost a social community and companies wishing to do any kind of business on Facebook should realize that straight off. Yes, Facebook does utilize a PPC (paid advertising system) which displays ads on either side of the screen. Facebook was designed, however, to be a method of chatting so marketing and other commercial activity is usually a subset of that. You can build a “promotional presence” on Facebook quite easily. Thinking that you will make a killing using PPC that way would be a mistake. However, any promotional advantage that a company has on Facebook should come first from its pages and second from advertising, and like all social media the goal is to make them talk to themselves. In other words, don‟t purchase PPC ads on Facebook if you don‟t also have a page. The advantage of social media in general is that the networking aspect to it allows a user to easily target ads at a particular demographic. All advertising methods must utilize the cross-match approach in order to have their ads in front of a specific set of consumers. One of the tricks of social media advertising is understanding user motivations. Social Media is used for chit chat and users are extremely turned off by direct advertising such as PPCs. This is understandable.

If someone is performing a search on Yahoo or Google they are looking for something in particular. Such is not the case with Facebook, Twitter, etc. Therefore how you look at advertising needs to change. Pay per clicks on Facebook can be useful, but not as much as producing community driven content and event announcements. Understanding this is the key to spending you advertising dollars wisely. If you want a any kind of return on investment then you need to concentrate on both community driven social media content before attempting PPC. One must feed into the next for it to have any monetary impact. Considering that Facebook offers free pages it makes logical sense to utilize them, rather than attempting to meet a pre-existing user demand that comes with keyword based advertising approaches.

However, if you are going to go this approach then be savvy and have both a Facebook page and a PPC that links to your Facebook page. You will find that the more that people you grow as “friends” or “fans” the more free advertising you will get. Not to sway anyone against PPCs on Facebook, but if you are going to use them then use them wisely.