Small businesses are always looking for new and effective ways to promote their brand and products. However, this can be tough especially when considering the difficulty of reaching your own fans. Small business often feel the pressure of being a small fish in a big pond when trying to deliver content online, and this can sometimes lead to disappointment and frustration. Luckily there some tools already in place to help businesses strengthen their voice on the internet, and help get the right attention from the right people. Google AdWords and Facebook’s Promoted Posts are tools that many business use to become more visible and promote their content online.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is a service provided by Google that allows companies to buy search results on their Google search engine. AdWords allows businesses that set up accounts and  set daily budgets and only charges those accounts when ever someone clicks on your ad; essentially paying for results. These ads appear at the top or right hand side of a Google search result page. AdWords allows you to set keywords that as business would like to appear on when searched on Google, AdWord account also allow you to update these keywords or ads whenever you want. These ads can also be tailored geographically by town, state, nation, or world, giving businesses a greater reach or selectivity of audience. AdWords is an amazing tool to use to promote sales or brand awareness.

 Facebook Page Promotion

Facebook Page Promotion is tool that offers businesses the opportunity to pay for more reach on the social network. Promoted page posts can be as varied a content promotion, sales advertisement, product advertisement, or simply brand advertisement. Page promotion allow users to pay for, starting at a low $5 a day, sponsered posts that will appear on the pages of fans or friends of fans timelines. These posts can also be tailored geographically and demographically for targeting purposes and similarly to Google AdWords, Facebook also allows users to track their promoted posts’ performance with analytics on their views, likes, and shares that tally up to your post’s reach. However, there are some rules to these promoted posts. First, posts can not be more than 20% text or your ad will not be approved for promotion, and secondly promoted posts will not appear on timelines anywhere from 1 to 3 days after first promotion in order to keep timelines fresh and new. Another factor that I found slightly concerning about Facebook’s promoted posts was their lack of transperancy on how exactly the daily budget was being spent. I understand that businesses are paying for their posts to appear more readily on fan pages and friends of fans, which according to Facebook usually appears on about 16% of fan timelines, but how exactly is the money spent; on clicks, likes, shares,views? With that small issue in mind, Promoted Posts are a great tool for small businesses because small budgets of just $10 a day can give them the estimated reach of about 1,900 to 5,000 people.