So, you’re an experienced paid search or organic SEM professional who wants to tap into the power of Facebook self-serve advertising to expand your reach. It’s a great idea to broaden your horizon and campaign potential, however there’s a a couple of truths that you need to realise before getting started...

1. 10 Facebook Advertising Tipsfor Paid Search Experts Magnus Nilsson bravenewme.com

2. Setting the Scene Facebook Self-serve platform is a great way to expand your reach It can compliment your PPC and SEO activity Uses a similar algorithmic / quality based platform as search marketing

3. Truth #1 It’s Display Advertising – Not Search With the risk of starting off by stating the obvious it's the first important truth that you need to get your head around before reading the rest of the list

4. Truth #2 People Aren't Necessarily Interested in your Product or Service Users are earlier in the buying cycle compared to search They are not actively typing in keywords, but instead they are matched against users interests (such as movies, music, groups etc...) The demographic targeting outshines many of its rivals and particularly search engines

5. Truth #3 Your Click Through Rate (CTR) is Going to be Low compared to Search You need to obsess with CTR, but be aware but be aware that it is likely going to be in the 0.x% area due to truth number 2. CTR is however key to campaign success as you'll see below.

6. Truth #4 High CTR is Key As Facebook uses your advert CTR and bid to recalculate to what it calls an eCPM, if your ad is simply not performing you will, similarly to AdWords, be penalised with a higher cost and get fewer impressions.

7. Truth #5 There's No Fancy Desktop Editor or Public API Although there's an invite-only beta of Facebook self-serve API for strategic partners, most marketers will for now have to do with the web interface. It does its thing, but workflow wise it's not yet very well optimised or intuitive. However, looking at the recent developments and talking to the Facebook team, my expectations are that it will evolve fairly swiftly into something much more usable and productive.

8. Truth #6 Facebook Self-serve Takes Time, a Lot of Time Due to the previous point it will take you a decent amount of time to launch an initial highly targeted campaign (e.g. one line per age group/gender/location/interest) There is a lot of daily micro management by tweaking individual advert 'lines’ and necessary reports Facebook is aware of the issues, and hence putting a lot of resources into improving the advertiser experience.

9. Truth #7 If It Goes Terribly Wrong, Just Start Over If your CTR falls too low and your campaign gets penalised with higher CPC, there's typically little chance to bring down the costs and impressions back up again. Due to the inner workings of the Facebook advertising engine, at this point you're better of recreating the campaign from scratch to start off with a lower CPC.

10. Truth #8 Your old PPC Ad Copy Won't Work Due to different audience and approach there's little point in putting "keywords" in ad copy titles as per PPC best practice Need to be more creative Tweak, Measure, Valuate and Repeat.

11. Truth #9 Smiling People Gets you Clicks People like to click on ads with attractive smiling people Don’t’ go overboard and if you try to be too 'creative' and show some skin, you're very likely to see your advert CTR shoot through the roof, get flagged internally at Facebook and ultimately disapproved as they have quite stringent rules on what your ad copies can look like.

12. Truth #10 Facebook is Keen to Get You Onboard If you can commit some resources for a trial campaign, Facbook is typically happy for you to get in touch Use the resources at hand!

13. This slide show is based on an article posted on www.bravenewme.com Want More Digital Marketing Ideas?Visit www.bravenewme.com Magnus Nilsson bravenewme.com