Television, without a doubt, is one of the greatest forms of advertising but is also one of the most costly. For a typical TV advertising campaign you’d be looking at around £40,000 to £250,000 per month…and that’s without adding on the costs of the production of the advertisement. Bearing in mind you can’t pick exactly who you want to target as the campaign is based on profile selection of Tv Show viewers, it’s not exactly the most cost effective form of advertising.

However, through Social Media, you’re able to pick exactly who you want to target, and how much you want to spend on each person. Facebook, in my opinion, is the greatest of Consumer profiling. Instead of basing your advertisement on an external product’s viewers, it lets you choose which Consumers you want to target, with profile information provided directly by the consumer…essentially cutting out ‘Middle Man’ consumer filters.

If, for example, I wanted to target users in Manchester advertising a Kitchen appliance designed for Students, I can bring back an exact number of people I could reach. A quick play about with the criteria, entering specified interest keywords (cooking, baking, eating, food etc) presents me with the following:

• 3,220 people
• who live in the United Kingdom
• who live within 80 kilometres of Manchester
• between the ages of 18 and 25 inclusive
• who like cooking, eating,food, baking or eating out
• who are at university

Although not everyone uses Facebook, is it not better to have focussed advertising such as this and save money, especially as you can set exactly how much you want to spend per day and stop the campaign anytime, than use something such as Television Advertising and perhaps never reach your target audience?

Is your business using Facebook Ads to get your product out there? Any thoughts on the topic would be welcome.