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    When to Use Paid Advertising on Facebook for your Hypnosis Business

    by Erika Flint on

    Yesterday on the new OurHypnoSpace website where I lead a Marketing Hypnosis group, someone posted a question about how to use Facebook to attract business and "likes" to a Facebook page, so I thought why not just write an article on when to use paid advertising on Facebook. Facebook has changed quite a bit in the last few years. It used to be a great way to connect with your fans for free, but now Facebook is focusing on paid advertisements, and in general for anyone with a Facebook page for their business, the trend is that business pages will need to do more and more paid advertising as they are limiting the organic reach of any post. So it's harder to get your message out to your fans in Facebook without paying for it, and there's speculation that it will get even harder over time.

    How to get more Facebook page "likes"

    Simply put the best way to get page "likes" is to create great content. This is the same message for anything online. Want to grow your email list? Create great content. Want to increase your SEO rankings? Create great content. It takes time, and for Facebook and other social media outlets, most experts recommend posting at least 3 times per week. Write about what you know, and what you're passionate about.

    So when should you use Facebook paid advertising to promote your hypnosis business?

    When you want to use specific interest targeting to attract business

    Facebook advertising is relatively inexpensive and highly configurable. You can target people to view your ad or boosted post based on interest which is great since you could target people in your local area that are already interested in hypnosis, self-hypnosis, or other things you think your clients or students would be interested in to attract the right people to like your page. Interest targeting is a unique selling point for Facebook - Google (AdWords) does not offer this type of interest targeting without a lot of work, so it's a great feature of Facebook.

    I do this to attract people to my website for community based education classes on self-hypnosis, stress management, and other classes I teach. Facebook is a great way to bring in new students for community classes because of the relatively low barrier to entry for interest targeting.

    How it compares with AdWords : There are fewer people searching for hypnosis classes online, so I use Facebook and interest/geo targeting to advertise upcoming classes.

    When you want to highlight a specific blog article or content on your website

    Facebook is a great way to drive people to your site for a specific article you have created. This is part of creating great content for your website. Doing so will increase your organic search rankings. Once you have a great piece of content, promote it on Facebook, Goolge+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Then, you can further promote it on Facebook by "boosting" your post for $5 or $10.

    How it compares to AdWords : AdWords and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is great at driving potential clients to your website when they're looking for something like "lose weight" - the ads are highly targeted and potential clients are  looking for your service right at that moment. But AdWords campaigns are really targeted at bringing people to your site on an ongoing basis - not to highlight a single blog article you authored, at least not affordably. Promoting a single page post or article on your website with Facebook is really easy and cheap. Ideally once a potential client read a great article you wrote on your blog, they'd sign up for your email list and be a potential client or student.

    When you have an event that you want to highlight

    Facebook is a great way to promote an event, or class you're teaching. This is one area that I regularly use for Facebook advertising - I will create a  post for a class, then boost the post for $5 to attract local clientele to attend. It's one of the best ways I've found to bring in new students. To be clear, I DO NOT use a Facebook Event for this. That did not work well for me. I did not like how those worked, because you basically need to invite all of your "fans" for which they'll be notified and possibly be annoyed.

    As with anything online - whether you are advertising with AdWords, or improving your SEO rankings, it takes time. Yes it's possible to "buy" Facebook fans with a lot of advertising which is geared at getting people to "like" your page, but it's better to build your fan page organically, because the purpose of fans on a Facebook page is to have an audience to post content, and events that they would be interested in. It doesn't make sense to have 500 fans if they don't care to interact with your content. So I believe that organic page likes is preferable. This can be done by adding a link to Facebook on your website, in your email marketing, and of course create great content! Then people will actually "like" your page and what you have to say.

    I hope this helps, and as always I want to hear your input, please leave comments and questions below.

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