Facebook ads works wonders for many businesses. It is a great way or promoting events, sales or even just your page to thousands of people and with targeting available you can be assured that your ads are reaching the right people. The majority of businesses that use Facebook ads use the core audience setting. This allows you to select people to show your ad to that are within a certain geographical location, interests, behaviours and demographics such as age and relationship status. This ensures you get the most for your money and that your ad is not showing to people that it may not be relevant to.

With demographics you can chose to show your ad to people within a certain age bracket, relationship status, gender, job title and education. The behaviours side of the targeting allows you to aim your ad at people based on their previous purchase history, device usage and other activities they have completed through Facebook.

You will need to put aside a budget to dedicate to the Facebook ads and then allocate someone to manage them for you – this may be either someone in house or a third party company.

With the recent cases of misuse of data coming to light many people are getting a little concerned as to how certain companies are getting hold of and using their data. The data protection laws state that a business must have prior and continued permission for their details to be used by a company or passed on to another company to contact them. Unfortunately some companies seem to have taken this quite lightly and some social media sites seem to be using our data in ways we are not aware of.

It is very important to try and protect your own data as if it gets in to the wrong hands then you may find yourself becoming victim to fraud.

When using any 3rd party app through social media sites or when redirected to another website it is imperative that you check exactly what and with who you are signing up to. Historically companies used to pre select boxes or hide them behind read more tags, showing that you agree to be contacted by other companies, this is no longer allowed and businesses must make it clear what data they will use and how you can change your preferences.

Which a huge percentage of Christmas shopping being done online, using social media as part of your marketing strategy all year around but especially approaching Christmas is a must.

Christmas marketing campaigns by the major retail brands have become more elaborate by the year, with social media now playing an integral part. Year upon year these companies compete for the best Christmas ad and often refer to social media to get their viewers exciting and discussing it. Social media can offer a free way to advertise your business and if you have products that are ideal for the festive season or that you want to put on sale, then taking advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday will often see an increase in your profits.

Use social media to get people taking about your business and make sure that any sales you have or Christmas competitions are promoted on all of the social media platforms possible.

If you are a small business owner you may feel that you cannot compete around Christmas time, but social media will allow you to get noticed along with some of the big players if you create the right campaign.

Many businesses use Facebook and Twitter etc. to market their products and services and over the last few years, small business owners have welcomed the amount of increased enquiries and sales that this has bought in.

Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform for small business and can literally grow a business’s customer base over night. SO how do you set up the right profile on Facebook for your business and what is needed in order to maintain it? When a user is searching on Facebook they will often type in a product or service and possibly a local. Facebook tends to work well for local advertising but can work nationally if the product or service you are offering can be supplied to them at their location rather than them having to come and visit you.

When you set up your profile, include as much information as you can such as opening times, pictures, contact details and services / prices. You may also want to try and get your previous customers to leave some reviews for others to read. Make sure that you post something on your profile page at least once a week and if possibly run competitions and ask for followers to comment on your posts to maintain interaction with them.

Many businesses use one of more of the social media sites for marketing purposes. Some find it easy to market their business and get a lot of response from it where as others may struggle to build up a community or to know what to write.

When you do post anything on a social media site or indeed on your own website, be sure to spread it across all sites in order to get the most of out one article. You may want to reword it slightly, or just put snippets on the social media sites that click back to your website for the full article.

Before hiring a social media specialist, you need to educate yourself. This does not mean you need to become an expert in the subject, but you should at least know the basics. This will save time and money as your social media specialist will not have to take time to train you on this and there may be some parts that you can do yourself and leave the more technical items to the specialist. As well as this, you may want to study the lingo used on the social media sites such as RT for retweet, Hashtags etc.