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According to Perry Marshall and Thomas Meloche, Facebook advertising is different from advertising using Google Adwords. On Google, the prospective customer is searching for help. On Facebook, you must capture the prospective customer's attention to engage him or her in a conversation, as if you were inviting a neighbor passing by in front of your home to stop and visit while enjoying lemonade and cookies.

Another title for this book could have been "How not to lose your tail advertising on Facebook."

Facebook is challenging as a marketing medium. It's enticing because of the ability to target prospective customers based on information provided in their profiles. You have to remember that Facebook users are mostly visiting the site for entertainment, not to buy stuff. A lot of money is being wasted with ineffective advertising.

Advertising on Facebook is also hard work because advertisements tend to burn out or become ineffective in a short period of time – usually only three weeks. That means the ads have to be constantly "refreshed" with new images and messages.

For most print advertising, the headline is the key to capture a reader's interest. On Facebook, the key is the image or photo for the ad.

According to Perry Marshall and Thomas Meloche, every small business should have a Facebook fan page. By engaging customers with status posts they "like", you then build an audience for very cost-effective ads.

If your "fans" don't "like" or comment on your status posts, Facebook may not even forward them after a few weeks, so you might actually be talking to yourself!

Perry Marshall and Thomas Meloche explain the nuts and bolts of how to bid for Facebook advertising, how to define who will see your message, how to write an effective advertisement, how to test an advertisement to determine whether it's working before making a major investment in displaying it to a larger audience, what should be included on a "landing page", and how to construct an offer to entice a prospective customer to share his or her email address for further follow up. They explain how to use statistics generated by Facebook to evaluate the effectiveness of your advertising.

They also explain how to promote yourself with your free posts, but emphasize that to build a real business, you must use paid advertising. Interest tends to die out for "free" posts after awhile, and you have more control over whether your message is viewed when you pay for the service.

With the understanding that Facebook is constantly changing, the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising is an invaluable reference that should be studied as a first step to developing a marketing plan for Facebook.

Buy it on Amazon: Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising: How to Access 1 Billion Potential Customers in 10 Minutes (Ultimate Series).

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