Facebook Advertising Basics — Do I Need A Facebook Page To Run Ads? | TBS #229

Facebook is a native ad platform, which means the ads look like regular news feed posts. And if you think about the way regular newsfeed posts look like, you’ll notice that there’s always either a page or a personal profile picture and name linked to the post.

So in order for Facebook to create native ads, and make sure your ad looks like an organic newsfeed post, you need to link a page.

Your page profile picture and name will show up next to your ad.

This is awesome because you’ll get a lot of page likes as a side effect of running your Facebook ads, which makes it easier to re-market and sell more stuff to the same people while paying less for ads.

So here’s how you can create a Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Just visit the link above and then follow the step-by-step instructions to set up your Facebook page. Upload a profile picture, which might just be your logo, and some sort of header image. You can get header images on Flickr.com by searching for “Creative Commons” pics.

You don’t need any content or any likes on your page before you start running ads. Whenever I start a new campaign, I have zero content and zero likes on my page. You’ll get likes as a natural side-effect of running a successful ad campaign, so it’s something that comes after and not something that comes first. Just start running ads and then start posting some content on Facebook sometime at a later point.

You can build fan pages with thousands and even tens of thousands of likes pretty fast with a successful ad campaign. And once you have a few thousand fans, you can start posting some content.

Don’t overthink the whole process and just set up your first ad campaign. You don’t have to do everything perfect the first time.

You can always improve or change your page once the ad is running.