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The Power of Facebook Advertising Infographic

Facebook have just released this really interesting infographic that gives us a real insight into the true power of Facebook advertising. The infographic looks at the time spent on Facebook by internet users compared to other websites, the level of engagement from users and also how this can then influence sales for your business, both online and offline.

The above section shows the total monthly visitors to Facebook (955 million) and, more importantly, how that compares to the actual time spent on Facebook compared to the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. From the graph, it is clear to see that online users spend almost double the amount of time that they do on Facebook than what they do on Google. The key message to take from this is the potential exposure that Facebook paid advertising can offer when compared to traditional PPC such as Google Adwords.

One part of the infographic that I personally think holds the biggest advantages to Facebook advertising is shown above. The ability to not just target users based on their demographic and geographic location, but to actually target users that have a specific personal interest is really quite important.

The constant argument that people have against social advertising is that, unlike on PPC platforms such as Google’s Adwords, users are not specifically looking for the adverts that they are exposed to. What I mean by this is that they have not searched for ‘running shoes’, for example, to be shown adverts about running shoes. On the other hand, Facebook looks for semantic links that users possess that would indicate that they would actually be interested in this. For example, the user may ‘Like’ ‘Nike’ and ‘Adidas’, use running applications such as ‘MapMyRun’, have ‘checked-in’ at their local gym and are also friends with others that do the same. This allows us to take a whole new perspective toward paid advertising and online segmentation. It allows us to actually suggest our products/services to users that would be interested in them, but haven’t had the initial ‘intent’ that is needed for traditional PPC to work.

The next part of the infographic is all about ‘engagement’. The figure showing that within each day there are 3.2 billion ‘Likes’ and comments around the world is extremely impressive. This really shows that Facebook doesn’t just get high levels of web traffic, but it shows that they are also regularly interacting and engaging with the different aspects of the site.

Another good point displayed is the degree of exposure that your business can achieve through using some of the new paid advertising features that Facebook have implemented. The ‘sponsored story’ is a particularly useful feature that we have had some great results with at Wow Internet.

The final part of the infographic focuses on the most important aspect for business, the return on investment. From an analysis of 60 different campaigns carried out by different online brands, Facebook found that 49% of them saw a 5x or more return on investment, whilst 70% same a 3x or more return. Not only this, but when it is compared to the online average, Facebook advertising is 35% lower in cost per conversion.

The ability that Facebook advertising gives for businesses to increase the virality of their posts can be truly invaluable. With the ever increasing amount of new features being added is helping to make online targeting more and more effective. Not only this, but it is proving to be much more cost effective than traditional methods. My recommendation is that if you haven’t already started using social advertising, take a look into it.

Download the high-resolution infographic here (PDF)