What is Facebook Marketing?

Facebook is a free social networking platform with nearly 3 billion users. You can use Facebook to increase brand awareness, promote products, or gain followers for a cause. In this overview, you’ll learn more about what Facebook marketing is, what it can do, who uses it, and how to learn it so you can determine how to add this skill to your professional toolbox.

What Can You Do with Facebook Marketing?

When you sign up for a Facebook business account, you can use free analytical tools to tap into information from almost 3 billion users to determine your target audience. Once you know who you are trying to reach, set some goals for what you want to do on Facebook, and devise a plan for posting content.

You have many choices as to the type of content you post, including text, photos, videos, links, stories, and pinned posts. Other ways to engage with your audience include Facebook Live gatherings, watch parties, job listings, Messenger and chatbots, raising money for charities, Facebook Q&A, and groups. 

Facebook also has analytical tools through the Facebook Business Insights Suite. This can help you create paid targeted ads through Facebook Ads, or you can use the free Facebook Pixel tool to gather data to use down the road if you decide to run paid ads later.

How Do You Get Facebook Marketing? How Much Does it Cost?

Facebook is free to use. You can sign up for a personal or a business account, and neither one costs anything. Once you determine your target audience using Facebook’s free Business Suite Insights analytics tools, there are many ways to attract followers and engage with them through different posts. Another way to build your business through Facebook marketing is to buy Facebook Ads.

Most businesses on Facebook choose to use Facebook’s paid advertising instead of relying entirely on organic reach. Facebook Ads gives you access to billions of users and data to let you create specifically targeted ads to reach your audience. If you don’t want to pay for ads just yet, you can install Facebook Pixel, a free analytics tool that will start collecting data you can use when you decide to advertise.

There is no set cost for Facebooks Ads. You decide how much you want to pay and set a limit on either the overall amount you are willing to spend or the cost of each action. You can choose between a spending limit on a particular campaign or a maximum amount you want to spend for all the campaigns on your account. In any case, you control the cost of your Facebook advertising.

What Are the Benefits of Learning Facebook Marketing?

With almost three billion users, the primary advantage of learning Facebook marketing is the size of the potential audience. Facebook provides free analytical tools to allow you to narrow your target audience and reach the kind of users most likely to connect with your product or service. 

Facebook marketing also provides an opportunity to build an organic reach for your product or brand without paying for advertising. Facebook generates revenue from paid advertising and doesn’t charge users, so all you put into your Facebook campaigns is effort. If you have identified your audience correctly and keep up a steady engagement, you can build a lot of support without spending any money. However, as they grow, most businesses eventually pay for ads through Facebook Ads.

Read more about why you should learn Facebook marketing. 

Facebook Marketing Careers

Learning Facebook marketing can help you switch to a new career as a Social Media Marketer. Facebook is one of many platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where people congregate online to share interests and information. Nearly 5 billion people worldwide use social media, with almost 3 billion on Facebook alone. This is why social media marketing is so crucial to ecommerce.

Social Media Marketers on Facebook can focus on paid or unpaid advertising. The latter is called organic or earned marketing, which involves engaging your audience through 

high-quality content, clicks, likes, and shares. Earned marketing is valuable because you don’t have to pay for it, but it can take a long time to see results, so many companies opt to buy Facebook Ads. Social Media Marketers decide what demographics fit their audience and design campaigns to reach them. 

Facebook Marketers also use data analytics tools to find out about their target audience and track their behavior on the platform. This is similar to what Data Analysts do with tools like Google Analytics. Learning Facebook marketing could lead you to learn other analytics tools and move to a career as a Data Analyst.

How to Learn Facebook Marketing

The quickest and easiest way to learn Facebook marketing is to sign up for a class. If you choose to take a live class, either in person or online, you will have a real-time instructor with experience in Facebook marketing to guide you. You can ask questions or get help if you need it. There will also be other students in the class whom you can interact with. While you might prefer to attend an in-person class, they aren’t always available, and live online classes run similarly, except you won’t have to look for a parking space.

You can also choose an on-demand class to learn about Facebook marketing. These classes are pre-recorded and you can watch them at your own pace, but you don’t have access to a live instructor who can answer your questions. Facebook offers on-demand classes on topics like attracting an audience, building relationships, and monetizing your content. 

If you don’t have time for a whole class, you can learn Facebook marketing on your own by watching free tutorials, reading blogs, and listening to podcasts. Noble Desktop’s free seminar, Intro to Facebook Marketing, can help you develop a Facebook marketing strategy, use your strategy to create content that will attract your audience, and explain how paid advertising works.

Read the full guide on how to learn Facebook marketing.

A Brief History of Facebook Marketing

Facebook was founded in 2004 by a group of students from Harvard University. Originally called Facemash, it began as a website where students could judge the attractiveness of their peers. The university forced developer Mark Zuckerberg to take the site down after two days. Still, the site was so popular that Zuckerberg, along with Eduard Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, registered a URL for Facebook. The name came from the booklets that colleges and universities published for the incoming freshman class. These booklets had pictures and biographical information on new students to help them get to know each other. 

Facebook was initially limited to students, but membership opened to anyone in 2006. It quickly overtook MySpace, the most popular social network at the time. Facebook has always been free to use and earns most of its revenue from paid advertising. Facebook went public in 2012 with an initial public offering of $16 billion, ten times that of Google’s IPO. In 2021, Facebook’s parent company became Meta Platforms, worth $384 billion. 

Comparable Applications

There are many other social networking platforms available on the internet, but none of them come close to the power of Facebook. Instagram, which also belongs to Meta Platforms, and Twitter are two other options. Instagram focuses more on photos and videos, although users can share memes and comments on photos. Twitter is more text-focused and is known as a place where journalists hang out. As social media platforms, all three are places where you can use digital marketing practices to attract and engage audiences.

Learn Facebook Marketing with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

You can learn Facebook marketing with classes from Noble Desktop. For a solid introduction to Facebook marketing, sign up for the Facebook Marketing Bootcamp. This course will help you switch to a career in the industry. Classes are small, and instructors are experienced with social media marketing. You can retake the course for free up to a year after you first take it. You can attend in-person classes at Noble Desktop’s New York City location or attend live online from anywhere in the world.

For a deeper dive, try Noble Desktop’s Social Media Marketing Certificate. With this class, you can master successful social media marketing tools and techniques across platforms. You will learn about strategy development, content creation, brand building, analytics, and conversion optimization. 

Noble Desktop also offers more detailed courses for those looking to hone their skills on specific channels, such as Email Marketing, Social Media Content Marketing: Blogs & Twitter, and Video Marketing: TikTok & YouTube. Other Noble Desktop resources that can help prepare for a career in Facebook marketing include its digital marketing blog, which has detailed articles about social media marketing, SEO, and other essential tools for digital marketers. Further resources include Noble’s seminar entitled Intro to Facebook Marketing.

Key Insights

• Facebook is a free social media platform with almost 3 billion users.
• Facebook marketing lets you identify a target audience, set goals, and build relationships with your audience through engagement. You can build a following through organic engagement or paid advertising.
• It doesn’t cost anything to use Facebook, but many businesses choose to run paid ads.
• Social Media Marketers, Digital Marketers, and Data Analysts use marketing techniques similar to Facebook Marketers.
• You can receive comprehensive Facebook marketing training through an in-person or live online course with Noble Desktop.