When it comes to online marketing and social media there is no bigger or more effective medium than facebook advertising. Every business both big and small across the nation has seen the benefits of having a social presence on facebook. It’s large and engaged social user base has literally been able to grow businesses overnight with very little advertising costs or risks. If you’re interested in advertising on facebook you basically have 2 options to choose from, the first is the traditional pay per click model using facebook’s own self serve advertising system.

The self serve advertising system is the core of facebook advertising and it’s probably one of the fastest ways to grow your business with minimal risk. The downside is that it obviously costs money but still not as much as other mediums such as radio and tv which are much less targeted in nature. On average you can expect to spend at least $0.50 per click on facebook and maybe even a little more depending on how competitive your market and reigon are. In addition to the costs of pay per click advertising you may find yourself having to hire an agency to run and manage the ads for you, especially if if you or none of your employees have any experience running facebook or other PPC based campaigns.

Your other option for advertising on facebook is through the use of fan pages, while you may not get as much exposure as you would through the PPC platform the upside benefit is that it’s 100% free for all businesses to use. The fan page sounds just like what its name implies, its a page on facebook where fans or customers of your business can gather and network with each other and get the latest news about your business via their facebookfeed. When this first came out many businesses didn’t really see the potential and they were slow to adopt it into their overall marketing plan but now that its been out for a few years many businesses are realizing just how important and effective fan pages can be.

The downside to this free and rapid advertising is that its very hard to properly scale, the way fan pages are supposed to promote your business is in the hopes that the friends of your customers will see that they are a fan of your page and that their curiosity will get the best of them and they will take a peek to see why their friend is interested in your page. From there your page can slowly grow and as it gets more fans, it attracts a bigger viral marketing component all on its own which is the catch 22.

In order to grow your facebook fan page, you need facebook fans. Without those fans your page will grow at a much slower rate, but without fans how in the world are you supposed to grow your page? Thats where purchased facebook fans comes into play, what many businesses do is buy a few hundred facebook fans for their page in hopes that they can attract more users. Some may see this as a form of cheating but many business owners claim that the viral nature of facebook forces them to take this approach that some have deemed as unfair. No matter how you view it you can’t disagree with the results because it works great.

Many people who buy a small amount of fans can quickly see their fan pages grow at a much faster rate and eventually they start seeing those fans come through the doors of their brick and mortar business to spend money and consume goods.