Facebook: you don't need to have a page to start advertising.

• Author: Hershberger, Tara
• Position: SOCIAL MEDIA

EVEN IF YOUR BANK DOES NOT HAVE A FACEBOOK PAGE YET, it should at least be taking advantage of Facebook advertising to reach more people, enhance your brand and sell products.

Why advertise on Facebook? Facebook is the leading social destination in the United States and has been for some time. Plus, according to a Nielsen report from August 2011, the average online American spends 7 hours and 46 minutes each month on the site, up a full 3 hours from just a year ago. That represents 26 percent of all time spent online!

Facebook ads offer the ultimate in custom targeting. Pick any age segment from 13 on up, choose your geography down to the zip code level, and add in any number of other specific targeting criteria and consider that your starling point. Ads can click to your Facebook Page (walk event, app) or externally directed to your website or product-specific landing page, for example.

Facebook ads have high recall

Facebook uniquely offers brand messaging lied to social context, which means showing friends who 'like" or have interacted with a particular Face-book Page or app. This is important because those types of social connection ads have been shown to have a high ad recall (68 percent) and are twice as effective. Social ads can help build "likes" to your Facebook Page, or encourage engagement with your content such as wall posts.

Advertising on Facebook is still relatively inexpensive compared to other online ad opportunities. Anyone can place Facebook ads--however, recently it has become more complex due to the number of different ad types and targeting options available.

Continually test your ads to get the most out of your Facebook advertising, Run multiple ad variations and test different headlines, images and body copy. Sometimes small tweaks can make a big difference. For example, a campaign we are running currently tests image background color, and results are showing a more favorable response rate on an ad that has a blue background rather than green. Test different audience segments too. Keep in mind that Facebook runs better-performing ads more often within the same campaign...