I was logged into my Facebook account the other day and a notice popped up telling me that Facebook Flyers, the internal self-service advertising system inside Facebook, had released a new version where you only pay per click.
Yes, that's right, a pay per click advertising system to target the highly lucrative Facebook userbase. It's called Flyers Pro and can be found by clicking the advertisers link in the footer area inside Facebook that looks like this -
I don't know about you, but I think this is pretty exciting news and represents an amazing opportunity, especially now since the service only recently went pay per click.
Remember what Google AdWords was like before everyone started using it? It was cheap and easy to get traffic since the competition wasn't present. I suspect Facebook will fill up with advertisers quick enough since word travels fast nowadays, but there is a golden opportunity to tap the high disposable income student demographic currently using Facebook before everyone catches on.
If your business targets students or you are an affiliate marketer who knows your craft and can find good products to promote to students (think loans, holidays, scholarships, ring tones, alcohol, t-shirts, party products, magazines etc), this represents an AMAZING opportunity.
Pay Per Click Vs Pay Per Impression
I tried the Facebook Flyers system to sell BetterEdit editing services and as a means to recruit students to put up posters for the business on campuses, back when it only had a pay per impression flyer option. Facebook certainly isn't short on page impressions - they have some serious inventory to sell given how many millions of students use the service, the length of time a user stays logged in and the number of pages they view each visit. Unfortunately my results were quite terrible. I got very few clicks and no leads.
I expect my results were poor due to the lack of time I spent using the system and my likely poor ad copy. I really didn't know what I was doing and just wanted to test it out since the demographic seemed so perfect.
With a pay per click advertising system in place that really changes the ball game, since you only spend money when you drive traffic. I suspect the direct marketers are salivating at the potential to generate leads from Facebook. I do wonder whether Facebook has or will have some kind of quality measure to keep the quality of advertising to a certain standard.
Demographic Targeting
When I saw this screen I got REALLY excited. Check this out -
How cool are those demographic breakdowns! Imagine a pay per click advertising service that can even differentiate the political views of the audience. With Facebook Flyers Pro you can target single people (think dating affiliate programs), or engaged people (think wedding products), males or females only, specific age brackets and education status.
Oh yeah, you can also input specific keywords for people's interests, so if you want to target all the golf playing students using Facebook you can.
It doesn't stop there, you can even target people based on what company they work for. Lets say you are Microsoft and you want to advertise job openings just to employees who work for Google, with Facebook, you can.
And let's not forget, all these details can be broken down by country, so you can easily geotarget. What's also really cool about the country selection option is as you change your selections and pick certain demographic options, Facebook tells you exactly how many users there are that match your criteria.
For example I can tell you there are approximately 220 male Facebook users who are married, aged 20-35 and are of a conservative political persuasion, from Egypt. I couldn't find an Egyptian company that had enough Facebook users to register data so I left that option out 
.
As you can see, that's some way cool information and amazingly specific targeting. Not even Google can offer demographic options to that detail and I'm hard pressed to come up with any other advertising medium that can offer such specific targeting.
The Facebook statistics should be highly accurate because of how the data is collected. Their userbase naturally fills out profile information as part of participating in the community and Facebook can pull up the information just by searching their membership database to deliver it to advertisers.
Seriously Lucrative Opportunity
Right now, if I was at all a player in the affiliate space outside of blogging, I'd be running to use Facebook Flyers Pro. With such a precise targeting system and a pricing structure that charges by the click, you can do all the usual testing procedures to ensure you return a profit and very tightly align what you are selling to the traffic you target. That should result in some very nice conversion rates and best of all, once you hit a profitable campaign, Facebook has traffic like an all-you-can-eat buffet - as much as you like until you get sick (and I doubt you will get sick of making money with Facebook traffic).
One potential downside is the competition moving in, so this is definitely an act fast, profit now opportunity. I've not done any experimentation myself, and there could be other pitfalls to watch out for that you don't know until you start testing. Maybe the positioning of the flyers means lower conversion rates, but I suspect, like most advertising mediums, all problems can be dealt with by testing and testing some more.
If anyone has made money with Facebook Flyers please leave a comment and tell your story, I'd love to hear it. Perhaps this article could serve as motivation to kick start a wave of people heading to Facebook and pulling in thousands of dollars from the flyers pay per click system. If only there was an affiliate program for Facebook Flyers…
Yaro Starak
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