Facebook is no stranger to the public eye. You’ve probably heard of Facebook, touted as perhaps the best social networking available today. With over 200 million active users worldwide, Facebook not only provides the perfect platform for socializing, but also to do a little bit of something called advertising.

Creating an advertisement in Facebook is simple. Users can customize the advertisement to give more focus on a specific age group, region, or other demographic or psychographic elements. Users can add images to the already rich information displayed. The two methods of payment are through either CPM (Cost Per thousand) or CPC (Cost per Click).

In CPM or better known as CPI (Cost Per Impression), the user pays the advertiser, i.e. Facebook, based on every 1000 times the advertisement is displayed on a Facebook page. For CPC on the other hand, the user pays based on every single click made on the advertising banner or link which leads to the loading of the advertiser’s page.

Facebook also offers a certain feature called Pages which are customized profiles designed to provide info for celebrities, bands, businesses, and many more. In contrast to regular advertising banners on Facebook, Pages allow much more interaction between the product and the user with users being able to follow a News Feed, view photos, post comments, as well as create or join discussion boards. Through news feed users are updated on the latest stories and friends on Facebook are able to track other friends’ activities on the page which drives the word-of-mouth capability on Facebook. Like normal Facebook advertising banners Pages can be set to target a specific demographic or psychographic group. In short Facebook Pages are likened to online blogs. Plus, unlike normal advertising banners Facebook Pages advertisements are somewhat modified into Social Ads where users are able to see that their friends have actually become a member or in this case ‘fan’ of the Page in question below the Social Ad.

Due to its high and ever-growing popularity Facebook is ranked high amongst search engines. This provides a benefit for advertisers who advertise on Facebook as their links which are posted on Facebook will also show high on the search engines. This helps boost the credibility of the product or business. Facebook has come a long way from a site simply created for people especially college students to swap photos and communicate to a multi-billion dollar site for people around the world to socialize and advertise freely.