Advertising on Facebook is actually a great way to promote your business. Of course, we all like things free, but with the right message, many businesses,small especially, will find the advertising abilities of the Facebook website to be very effective in cost and strategy.

Facebook Flyers allow you to target a message and/or picture to a select campus for $10.00 every 5,000 views, giving you a $2.00/cpm (cost per thousand impressions). That’s about the same as MySpace, but good luck even getting a hold of the MySpace advertising department unless your budget is well above $10,000 dollars. Also, I personally would think the impressions would be a little more effective on the Facebook website when compared to MySpace because of smaller amounts of clutter on Facebook.

When targeting your flyer, you can target by gender, age range, location, school, and grad/undergrad/or alumni, allowing for a pretty target detailed audience when compared to other advertising mediums.

In addition to the flyer, many businesses and organizations could find the polls to be of great use. As opposed to the static pricing of the flyer, polls actually use a “bidding/turnover time multiplied by specified reach” pricing model. They claim “for as little as $6.00…” so one would assume a ten dollar poll could get you decent results, probably not statistically random enough for 100% accuracy, but decent enough for most purposes if you buy enough reach.

The rest of the ad services include more customized ads, which are able to be placed in more central and integrated areas such as the mini feed. The price of these obviously varies to your specific needs (reminds me of the sponsored, or as what they like to call, “featured,” profiles that companies pay for on the Myspace website). Unless you’re going to be placed into the mini feed, I wouldn’t bother with the higher end solutions. The plain flyers seem to do the best job of looking like it is actually part of the Facebook website and not an ad (something users will find relevant). When a user starts seeing a customized ad, or some text links in weird, thick bordered boxes which have been displayed a lot recently, they know its an ad and ignore it all together. Stick to the cheap and more integrated flyers and polls would be my advice, but you can always contact them and get some ideas for what they can offer your company. Want more information, here’s their ad page. http://www.facebook.com/advertise.php