Social Network Marketing Part 6 (continued): What Education Non-Profits Can Do About Facebook (article 2 of 2)

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Facebook offers 4 levels/types of services that may interest your education organization, whether you are in higher education, K-12, or an education related non-profit.

1) Facebook Flyers - Flyers are the facebook version of Internet ads. For $10, you can get 5,000 flyers that will appear on facebook pages, or basically 1/5th of a cent per impression. Flyers can be targeted to undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, male/female, based on an age range, through specific networks, and in different combinations of those categories. You can indicate how many times per day to display the flyer, ranging from 2,500 per day to 100,000 per day. So a 50,000 flyer/day 1-month campaign would only cost $3,000, a pretty good deal compared to other channels on the Internet. Your "flyer" is posted on the left side of Facebook pages under the search area. During your campaign, your flyer is also posted to the Flyer Board of the networks you are targeting. The network is a key aspect to consider, where this is where you can target your flyers to specific colleges and locations.

Extra tip - According to the Facebook web site, the best way to maximize exposure of your flyer campaign is to buy the maximum number of flyers per day for a week-long campaign.

2) Market Research Solutions - As the name implies, this is more focused on researching your market, rather than outreach. It is simple, really, you pay Facebook to poll their web site visitors for as little as $26. Considering that the site has the 6th most traffic on the Internet though, this polling mechanism could be very powerful to get quick answers to fill holes in your marketing strategy. At the same time, there are obviously some limits to what you can ask and the questions should be thought through carefully to make sure your interpretation isn't clouded by a poorly executed poll. In the world of polling, there is such a thing as a stupid question!

3) Integrated Solutions - This is Facebook's catch-all "other" category. If flyers and polls don't seem to fit, but you do want to tap into Facebook's vast user base in your outreach campaigns, this is your best bet.

4) MSN Network - While not listed on their site, Facebook has an exclusive advertising relationship with Microsoft to run their ads through the facebook pages.