The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

This article is part four of a four-part series on social network advertising. Get caught up on my three earlier posts below:

CPC Advertising on Social Networks

Hyper-Targeted Ads on Social Networks

Should You Advertise Directly on a Social Network?

So, you're skilled at writing ads for Google and Yahoo, but now you're expanding your CPC efforts to include Facebook and MySpace.  What is different on social networks?  How should your ad copy be different? The answer is that all the same best practices apply. While the methods are different, the principles behind them are the same. 

Let us first try to understand the best practices of search ad copy writing in an abstract and general way. Skilled search marketers know that when someone searches for "attorneys", you should give them an ad for "Attorneys", but when someone searches for "lawyers", you should show them a different ad for "Lawyers", because that ad copy is more relevant to their respective queries. An advertising medium with advanced targeting capabilities allows us to create specialized ads that are specifically relevant to particular niches. Ads are more effective when they are more specifically relevant to the individual who sees them.  (If this is not familiar territory for you, check out the Clickable University tutorial on writing effective ad copy). The same is true on social networks, where instead of targeting your ads by keyword, you target by demographic and social niche. Social network ads provide you with a unique opportunity to show people an ad that is obviously well matched to their individual interests and traits, even when they don't enter a keyword into a search engine.

Here are some specific tips on creating effective ads that take advantage of the social network ad medium:

• Mention or directly address the target audience in your ad copy. If your ad targets female Boston Celtics fans, include a phrase like "Celtics girls" in your ad. If your ad targets single people in Cleveland, make your headline "Single in Cleveland?" If you are urging 35+ married men to buy vacation packages to take with their wives, try an ad copy like "Take your wife to the Caribbean for Valentine's day" -- you know they're married, so go ahead and say so in the ad copy.
• Include an image that will appeal to your niche audience. If you're advertising a retail product, include a photo of the product that will resonate with them or catch their attention. A female Celtics fan is likely to find a pink Celtics jersey rather eye catching, and an NYU student is likely to notice the NYU logo in your ad.
• Separate campaigns into additional targeting groups just so you can make your ads more personalized. Your business may serve two segments equally, but you can still make separate ads for each niche. Consider these two ad copies: "Seattle's Top Divorce Lawyer. Don't let your soon-to-be-ex-wife take all your stuff!" vs. "Seattle's Top Divorce Lawyer. Don't let your future soon-to-be-ex-husband take all your stuff!"  An equal number of men and women get divorce lawyers, but if you target by gender you can specifically address whether the potential client is divorcing a wife or a husband. Or consider these ads for a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts: "Joe's Bar in Central Square, Cambridge. Thursday drink specials with your MIT ID card" vs. "Joe's Bar in Central Square, Cambridge. Thursday drink specials with your Harvard ID card".  Even though the drink special is available to all college students, making different ads for each of Cambridge's universities gives each ad a more personal touch.
  
• Consider adding an additional interest that is not directly related to your product just to grab attention, like targeting fans of different celebrities for ads for a hair salon. "Vavoom Salon. Get your hair styled like Britney Spears." vs. "Vavoom Salon.  Get your hair styled like Whoopi Goldberg." vs. "Vavoom Salon. Get your hair styled like Catherine Zeta-Jones."  Same salon, but different audiences, different idols, and different hair styles -- why not have different ads?

The Facebook ad below showcases some of these strategies.  Below the ad are the targeting options and Facebook's estimates of how big the audience for this ad is.
 

This will likely only be seen by NYU freshman and sophomores, who tend to order a lot of late-night cheap pizza to their dorms.  Bon appetite!

Ehren Reilly, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search-marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.