Facebook Ads : The new revolution on Advertising

Facebook Ads is a cheap way for start ups to  increase awareness through advertising on Facebook.

Which are the main advantages of this new way of advertising?

First of all, Facebook ads allows you  to  target  potential customers and customize your marketing campaign for them. You can choose the  age group, locations, interests of the persons that will receive your ad.  

Second, you can choose to pay this advertisement if the people click on it (per click basis). This allows you to pay only for the advertisement of the people that are interested in your product/service.

Additionally you can interact with your customer through surveys, games, lotteries that will allow you to understand better the users. Facebook has more than 800 million active users this allows you to interact if you want with a large  population.

Finally, Facebook provides information about the performance of the ad,this allows you to make changes in order to improve the results on it during your marketing campaign.

With Facebook Ads, not only you promote your page when a user becomes a fan of your Facebook page. As each user has an incredible network, each time that he “likes” a webpage ,his friends will be able to see his actions in their New feeds. This creates a networked promotion, that will increase the probability to have new fans in this users network.

Facebook ads is an excellent way to increase awareness, multiply the number of fans of your Facebook page or redirect potential customers to your webpage. With its customizable budget, it is an excellent choice for start-ups to start a marketing campaign.

Lourdes Peirano

How to Create a Viral Launch Page

I am currently working on a web start up that I hope to launch in the next 6 months. We are doing extensive market research and starting to grapple with the biggest question that it seems almost every web start up faces: now that we feel we've identified a service that people will actually (hopefully) want to use, how do we reach users and build a community? And then once we've actually gotten a sizable user database, say, 100,000 users or whatever metric is appropriate to your particular service/product, how do you get that to grow to 1 million users? The digital marketing landscape is an intimidating and potentially expensive and problem-fraught area for new websites to tackle. Do you pay for Google Adwords? Too expensive or not appropriate in the early stages of a new site?

And then you read about the sites that have gone from 0 to 10,000 users within their first week of launching. One of the ways these sites have built an initial frenzy of excitement, collected email addresses, gained PR, and built a "brand" even before activation of their sites has been through viral launch or landing pages. A launch or landing page for a start up typically includes anywhere from a name, email address box, and perhaps a photo, all the day up to a product description, signup forms, social media links, and more. Some are mysterious and exclusive, others informative. Ultimately, however, they allow a new site to start marketing to customers and building a user database before even having something to offer them. If the launch page is done properly and gets the right attention and PR, its like running a race by getting a couple laps ahead of your competition before the start gun goes off.

There is an absolutely phenomenal post on viral launch pages for those of you who are currently working on or planning to work on your own website or just curious, courtesy of Smashing Magazine:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/01/elements-of-a-viral-launch-page/.