Written by Rebecca Lovering, Social Media Coordinator for The Purpose is Profit

Facebook is touring the country, hosting events called Facebook Fit where they talk to local small businesses about how wonderful Facebook can be for them. This may be a welcome change to what has been a narrowing of opportunities for small, local businesses on Facebook, as reported by Jeff Bullas. I attended the New York session (as covered by Ad Age), the first of five such events being rolled out across the country (the others will be in Miami, Chicago, Austin, and Menlo Park).

The day was held in a converted industrial building with wide, open spaces divided by screens, stages, and potted plants. Facebook’s company culture was on display everywhere. All the benches were blue and white, the stages were floored in fake grass, and quotations about Facebook were projected on the walls. Several digital signs changed between announcements of the keynote (delivered by Dan Levy, Facebook’s Director of Small Business), and exhortations to relax with a game of Ping-Pong or a ride on one of several fixed-gear bicycles. Small booths resembling weathered-wood farmers’ stands offered bottled water, sandwiches, and apples, while an artisanal ice-pop maker pushed a handcart through the crowd. Camera crews floated around to capture the small business owners in their unnatural habitat. All in all, an inviting setup.

From the speakers and break-out sessions, I learned four things worth knowing:

1. Facebook has incredibly powerful targeting

Once you know whom you want to reach, Facebook can zero in on your ideal customer with incredible accuracy. Information that used to be laboriously collected and sold for non-trivial fees is a thing of the past with Facebook, where users volunteer volumes of useful information about themselves at unprecedented rates. You can target an ad by demographics of age, gender, relationship status, location, language… as many pieces of information as people can put on their profiles are available as targeting metrics. If you know your audience, Facebook can get your ad in front of them.

2. Newsfeed ads have a significant advantage over other online ads

The great targeting manifests in way-better conversion rates than other types of advertising online. Facebook boasts a 2% click-through for desktop users with newsfeed ads, and even higher rates for mobile users. That’s significantly higher than the fractions of a percentage point that most ads are able to bring in – including Facebook’s own side-bar ads, from which it is moving away.

3. Users define their own success

There are a number of things you might want from an ad: users connecting to your website (click-throughs), Likes for your page, or other quantifiable reactions to seeing your brand pop up. Facebook lets you choose from a range of options to define the success of your campaign. Like the many other metrics that compose the ad interface, this is a nice piece of customization for business owners.

4. Flexible financial options

Well, flexible as long as your lower bound is $5 a day. Campaigns are run with a daily budget that you set, either until the goals of the campaign are achieved or until a certain date passes. You also bid for each action you want to the user to take (Likes, clicks, etc.). The demographics you choose and action you want users to take will dictate what constitutes an effective bid, but you certainly have choices within the range they suggest.

It was definitely this last point in which Facebook was most interested – not in saving business owners money, but in getting it spent. As Facebook Fit’s own campaign gains traction, those bids mentioned above will go up with the rise in competition for eyes. This can do nothing but delight Facebook, who was floundering for a while to figure out how to make ads effective and to secure marketing dollars.

This event was more an opportunity for Facebookers to extoll the virtues of paid Facebook ads than an education for business owners in social media advertising. Similar to the way airlines are touting services as new and wonderful that are less than what they used to offer for free, Facebook is putting a shiny mask on the shrinking availability of organic growth to business owners on their platform.

All told, it was a pleasant tour through the advertising tools Facebook has given business Pages to reach out to customers and compel them through their doors.

And the artisanal ice pop was delicious.

Ed McLaughlin is currently co-writing the book “The Purpose Is Profit: Secrets of a Successful Entrepreneur from Startup to Exit” with Wyn Lydecker and Paul McLaughlin.

Copyright © 2014 by Ed McLaughlin All rights reserved.