Facebook’s New Advertising Opportunities

Advertising on Facebook isn’t a new concept. A lot of businesses, both big and small, invest in Facebook advertising to get more likes and more traffic for their business. You’ve probably noticed them at the left side of your newsfeed, or integrated into your newsfeed. Facebook advertisements are often targeted, meaning the ads shown to different people are based on their online behaviour. So if you’ve recently shopped online, you’ll be sure to find your Facebook ads enticing you to shop some more.

Facebook now has two advertising options for businesses that would like to expand their reach to a wider audience. These two options are job targeting ads, and video ads.

Introducing Facebook Job Targeting

Job targeting allows you to choose groups of people with specific job titles so that you may advertise to them. For instance, users whose job titles are related to a medical field (nurses, surgeons, physical therapists, etc.) may be the target for ads for medical equipment, or recruitment agencies for hospital staff. This is a lot like what you can do on LinkedIn. With this feature, you now have a better way to reach a business-to-business audience.
But unlike LinkedIn, the go-to social networking site for business-to-business marketers, Facebook may not fare as well with this type of advertising for a number of reasons. The following are the top reasons that experts remain skeptical about this new advertising feature:

• Not everyone lists their job title on their Facebook profile.

• Facebook data set for job titles may not be comprehensive enough to use as a reference for targeting certain users.

Video Ad Capability

You may have visited a couple of sites where a 15 second video ad suddenly starts playing on mute. Facebook plans to do the same. Unlike the typical banner-type ads you’re familiar with, the videos are practically guaranteed to catch your attention because of its movement. This new feature is currently being tested by Facebook for select advertisers. Facebook has also stated that they will be working with a company that allows advertisers to test how effective their videos are. They will also assess the content of each ad before it gets a go signal to appear in News Feeds.
This initial outline of the new video advertising option also comes with its own setbacks:

• Video ads must be of high quality, and must stick to the content guidelines. In line with this, they will most likely be too expensive for smaller companies.

• Users are less likely to be thrilled with the idea of a video suddenly playing when they’re browsing their newsfeed.

• Even though the videos will be on mute and may not bother some users, those who have a bandwidth limit on their Internet connection will not appreciate ads taking up paid bandwidth space.

Advertisements are everywhere, both in the real world and in the virtual world. Businesses are constantly under pressure to come up with better ways of advertising to potential buyers or clients. These new Facebook advertising options may be considered a huge step for some businesses, but their implications on users should also be taken into consideration.