There is more to Facebook than friends and contacts! Advertising with Facebook is an up-and-coming way to enhance your business. If you'd like to consider advertising with Facebook, here are some tips on how to make it work for you.

1. Determine your demographic

Known variously as your "target market," "target audience," "demographic," and so forth, determining just who it is you're selling to is a step that shouldn't be skipped. Facebook actually offers tools for you to research your demographics' Facebook presence - find out the groups, events, and individual profiles that are relevant to your business. 

2. Build your own business community

Facebook is about making connections. Building communities via Facebook is a good way to conglomerate members of your demographic and find new ones. For example, your clients and fans may join one of your groups and invite their friends to join as well. Keep it interesting and lively by holding discussions, virtual events, providing exciting information, and so forth.

Another note on community building - remember that this is a feature at the heart of Facebook, so direct sales ads tend not to do as well. The majority of Facebook users are on the site because they want to form relationships, not necessarily because they want to buy something.

3. Facebook resources

Facebook offers guidelines and tools for advertising. Check out www.facebook.com/FacebookAds for details on how Facebook recommends you advertise through them. You can develop your ad through a tool offered at www.facebook.com/advertising, too. You can just begin with an image and a brief tagline or description. Your ad will appear on the right side of those Facebook pages you have targeted.

4. Key words

It's a good idea to learn to integrate key words into your ads. These are words that are gleaned from people's profile information, and you can use these key words in your ad to customize it to a particular demographic. In fact, what you find in people's profiles is key to filtering out who is in your target market and who is not.

5. Set a budget

Setting a budget will help prevent you from experimenting with a lot of different ad techniques, thereby wasting money and time. Your advertising campaign should have a definite budget limit, and your goals need to be clearly defined alongside it. In other words, you need to know just what it is you expect for your advertising dollar.

6. Look at the ads of others

Consider doing some research - click on the ads you see on your Facebook page, and see what they are up to. What kind of ads seem effective? Which ones have an approach that appeals to you? Which ads keep appearing over and over, indicating they have something that's working for them?