Advertise Your Dev Page On Facebook For More Likes

Last week I talked about how to start engaging on social media.  I also touched on Facebook Likes and said that I would come back to it. Well here I am coming back to it. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of what you should be posting on a daily basis to your Facebook page (not yet), but I do want to show you how to advertise your page to people who will want to see it.

You’re probably thinking, “Patrick, I’m an indie game startup, I don’t have the money to start advertising. That’s why I’m using social media in the first place; it’s free!” I hear you, but the majority of page owners contact their friends and family to share the page and hope they will find some customers. I’m not saying you shouldn’t utilize friends and family, but the problem here is that Facebook’s networking capabilities are limited to a local network for a lot of folks. You aren’t selling your game to just your local market, you are selling to the world.

$40 US will net you roughly 200 Likes if you target the correct audience with an engaging ad. 200 Likes is a good start, from there you can rely on your social skills to keep those fans engaged. The more likes and comments you get on posts that you put up, then the more people will begin to see your page from around the world – for free! So let’s dive in to how you begin a Facebook advertising campaign.

Create The Ad

 The first thing you need to do is begin creating the ad. Once you are on your page you’re taken to the “admin panel.” From here you’ll want to click on “Build Audience” and then “Create An Ad.”

What Are You Advertising?

Now it’s time to tell Facebook what you’re advertising. Since I’m discussing how to generate Likes on your game dev page then you should select your Facebook Page here. But be aware that if you’d like to advertise an outside site, like your blog or website, then you can do that here as well.

What Is Your Objective?

Now you need to tell Facebook your objective for the advertising. Since you are trying to gain more likes on your page you should select “Get More Page Likes.”

Another option here is to promote a particular post which you may want to do if you want one of your page’s posts to show up near the top of your fan’s news feeds for a longer amount of time. This may be to promote a link to a game demo or the link to your website. This will only be promoted to current fans, but know that friends of fans will be able to see it if they’ve interacted on the post.

Another option here is to use the advanced options. You may want to do this if you want to promote an event. Maybe a demo you’ll be putting on at a local game shop.

Your Ad

In this section you will build your ad. The dimensions for your picture are 100×72 PX. I’d recommend creating an image in these dimensions specifically for the ad, this way the picture pops off the page and catches attention.

Your headline will be defaulted to your page’s name. In other ad settings discussed earlier you can change this up to 25 characters.

You are allowed 90 characters for the actual text of the ad. It is important to make every word count! This could be the tagline of your company, your current game, or anything you think will catch the attention of your target audience. Be careful here because all ads need to be approved and Facebook has strict guidelines for ads. For instance, placing more than one exclamation point after another is not allowed. I’ll talk about crafting tag lines in a later post.

Finally, you need to choose where people will land when they click on your ad. This can be your timeline or any tab you have on your page. You can get creative and set up a special tab on your page which unlocks some kind of bonus for people who Like the page. A reward for this may be a special wallpaper of your current game.

Sponsored Stories

The main thing to know here is that you should have “People Liking Your Page” checked off. This will ensure that when someone likes your page from this ad, it will then show up as a story for their friends, effectively getting your page out in front of more people.

Choosing Your Audience

 Here is a critical portion to your advertising. You need specify who exactly is going to see your ad. You might ask, “Why can’t I just type in every country in the world and let the ad run?” The reason this isn’t recommended is because people will end up seeing your ad that have no interest whatsoever in your game. Every view costs you money – you want the people who will want to play your game to see it!

As a starting point I would suggest selecting 4 countries that you’d like to get your name out to. After that select age and gender based upon whom your current game is designed for. I’ve said this multiple times in different articles, but you need to know your audience! If your game is designed for girls 13-17 then target that demographic. If your game is made for toddlers you should probably target males and females between the ages of 24-35 because they will be the ones downloading it, not the toddler.

For precise interests make sure you make a list of all games out there that are similar to your game in some way. By targeting people who like similar games you will get more engagement on your posts. I don’t recommend targeting a precise interest of “gaming” or “gamers” or anything similar. You can do this in the next section. Because you are looking for a small number of initial likes I recommend targeting as specific a person as you can, this way you get the most engagement from them later on.

After your precise interest targeting it is time to select broad interests. Within this section you can include an interest such as “gaming” (gaming is located under the “Activities” tab).

Your Connections or Not?

For gaining more Likes on your page you should leave “Only people not connected to _________” selected. This way you aren’t advertising to people who already like your page. When you’re spending money you want to get your name out in front of as many unique people as possible.

Pricing and Timeline

Finally you can set the amount of money that you would like to spend for the advertising campaign. Like I said earlier, $40 US will usually get you about 200 Likes if you target the correct audience and create a compelling ad. This will be enough people around the world interested in your game to start some good engagement with.

For the “Campaign Budget” select “Lifetime” and then select which dates you would like to run the campaign between. Because you selected “Get More Page Likes” the optimization is set to do this. Your pricing is also set to CPM as the default for generating Likes. CPM is Cost Per Thousand Impressions and it means you are charged a small amount every time someone on Facebook sees your ad. This is important because you are banking on the ad you created of your game to generate enough interest for someone to click Like.

From here you are all set to go! Click on “Place Order” and set up the payment details. Once this is complete Facebook will need to approve your ad. Once they have approved it you will receive a notification saying so and the ad will begin to run throughout the campaign timeline you’ve set.

Engagement

As the Likes start coming in don’t just sit back and do nothing! Post once or twice a day. As I said in an earlier post, the best time to post on Facebook is at Noon ET. How to engage your audience is another topic altogether, and something I will tackle soon. Until then good luck with your campaign and please feel free to comment on anything you see here, or ask any questions you have. I’d love to help if I can!

Talk soon,

-Patrick

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