Whether or not the application will take off is yet to be seen, but regardless of the success, or lack thereof, that this new app. will have, it’s very interesting to see Burger King making such a strong move into the world of Facebook as a means to reach its target customer base.

The group Burger King is targeting, the tweens through twenty-somethings that make up the bulk of Facebook’s user base, are pounded with ads more so than any generations past. The constant attachment to the internet comes with a constant supply of advertisements, for everything you could imagine, delivered from all angles. Predictably, these savy-surfers have become very good at simply ignoring the ads and surfing away through their games or chat or whatever content they may be enjoying. Ads aren’t considered the bad guy, but your run of the mill, cookie cutter advertisements simply won’t cut it with these folks.

S0 how does one get their ads noticed among a sea of people who’ve trained themselves to turn a blind eye? Easy. Well, easily said at least. You turn your ad into the very content that these people are on the internet to enjoy in the first place. While viral campaigns and the like are not new by any means in online advertising, gigantic companies like Burger King tend to be slow to react to the more cutting edge ways or reaching their audience. This is one reason it’s great to see BK taking such an active interest in spicing up their internet campaigns.

Another recent foray into the world of blending the line between ad and content is Burger King’s partnership with Seth McFarlane of Family Guy fame. “Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” is a series of animated shorts done by McFarlane’s company, Fuzzy Door Productions, and sponsored by Burger King. Available on YouTube, the intro to each episode has the King, Burger King’s mascot, on the run from some pop-culture danger, such as the Hovito warriors from Raiders of the Lost Ark. By sponsoring these videos, Burger King has essentially produced an advertisement, but in such a way that instead of being a burden, viewers are more than happy to watch it.

That willing involvement is the key to successful campaigns on the net. People are more than happy to go to YouTube and watch the opening sequence with the King and then the short, and quite funny animation that follows. Likewise, the tongue in cheek fun of telling your friend you sold them off for a free hamburger will make Burger King’s new Facebook campaign enjoyable enough for people not to mind the fact that they’re being fed an advertisement.

Burger King has done a very good job at using new media to reach out to its target audiences, and the way that they’re going about it tells me that someone in the marketing department at BK knows what the score is when it comes to reaching out to the types of users that sites like YouTube and Facebook attract.

One advertising medium that it is very easy to overlook though is the advertising program run by Facebook. Advertising on Facebook gives companies the ability to target their advertising efforts with laser accuracy while staying within almost any budget.

While Facebook does offer larger, more expensive campaigns for companies willing to shell out the kind of big bucks necessary for a large campaign with such a popular site, in this article we’ll focus on the benefits of using Facebook’s user ad publishing system, which any Facebook user can utilize.

The types of ads produced by Facebook’s user ad manager are the ones you’ll see on the far right hand side of the page while you’re surfing Facebook profiles. They are simple box ads with a title/link, a short description and an optional image.

Targeting:

The real attraction with Facebook ads is the ability for the user to target their ads with exceptional precision. Facebook ads can be targeted using the following parameters.

Geographic: When creating a Facebook ad, you begin by targeting geographically by country, state/province or city, depending on how narrow you want your geographical focus to be.

Age and Sex: You can specify your audience to be male, female or both, within any age range between 13 to 65. If you want your ad to show only to 23 year old men, then your ads won’t be shown to anyone outside of that demographic.

Keywords: This optional field will narrow your audience based on trigger words that occur in their Facebook profiles. Using a lot of keywords will generally drastically narrow your audience.

Education: You can choose to target by education with options including college grad, in college and in high school. If you select a single option, you can further narrow your targeting down to specific schools and even specific majors.

Workplaces: While Facebook is populated mostly by students, many workplaces have their own Facebook groups where employees chat and post information. You can use this field to target specific workplaces.

Relationship Status and Sexual Orientation: Finally, you can target your audience using relationship status (single, in a relationship, engaged, married) and sexual orientation (interested in men or interested in women).

After choosing all of the targeting factors for your ad, the Facebook ad manager will display the approximate number of users your that make up your targeted group. For instance, targeting people in the United States of all ages and all sexes, with no limiting factors chosen gives an approximate audience size of just over 42 million people. Meanwhile, choosing to target single men between the ages of 18 and 25 in Providence, Rhode Island yields an approximate audience size of 12,480 people.

Payment:

When putting up a Facebook ad, you have a couple of options as to how you want to pay for your message to be distributed among your target audience. The first option is Pay Per Click or PPC for short. This is the same system as most Google Adwords users will be familiar with, in which you bid a certain price that is the maximum you’re willing to pay for someone to click on your link and come to your site, and you’re charged a certain price at or below that bid (depending on competition) every time your ad is clicked through. This model works very well for campaigns in which your goal is to bring traffic to your website or landing page. The real benefit is that you only pay when a viewer takes action by clicking on your ad.

The second option is the CPM option, in which you pay not for clicks, but for views. In this option you set a bid that is the highest price you are willing to spend for your ad to be viewed 1000 times. A view constitutes any time your ad is shown on a users screen and 1000 views normally goes by very quickly! This model works very well for ads that have been proven to have exceptionally high click through rates. If you know that your ad will receive a lot of clicks, choosing the PPC model could end up costing an arm and a leg, whereas choosing the CPM model may cost you significantly less.

Optimization:

Writing Facebook ads optimally is generally the same as writing most other small format ads for the internet, which is covered in other posts and as such will not be discussed in detail here. However, one unique aspect of Facebook ads in relation to many other ad services is the ability to include a picture with your ad. This is an often overlooked, but extremely valuable option. When making facebook ads, always opt to put in an image. The better the image matches your ad, the better it will do, but overall, leaving an image out is normally a good way to make sure your ad doesn’t get noticed.