If you haven’t considered advertising on Facebook, you really should add it to your bag of tricks as soon as possible.

According to Michael Agger in a recent slate.com article, 150 million members are on Facebook now.

150 million people.

Consider this, I’m sure most of you know that Google adwords allows you to focus in on keywords and location. Critical elements to targeting your ads to exactly who you’re marketing to.

Google cannot (currently) tell you anything about the person searching on a particular keyword. This is typically why your ads on Google fail for generic terms, there is no context for the search term.

For example, say that we want to advertise on the key phrase “web development” with Google Adwords. I want to show my ad to people looking for web development services, not those looking to learn about web development. I have no context of the users making hundreds of thousands of searches per month on Google for “web development”. Even though those out-of-context searchers won’t care about your ad and you don’t pay for the user who doesn’t click on your ad, Adwords lowers your ranking with every person that doesn’t click on your ad. Generic terms hurt your campaign. The lure of millions of searches is tempting, but the waste of ad dollars can be detrimental to your campaign’s overall ROI.

Facebook gives you the ability to target the users and keywords. Do you want to target 18-25 year olds? Perhaps you only want to target people who are engaged. How about this, you only want to target people who work at Kohl’s department stores.

Facebook advertising has the ability to focus your advertisement like a laser-beam directly to the group of people your trying to market to.

I will post the Facebook ad campaign results next week for a local small business. I’ll put together a small case study and share the results with you. Stay tuned!