One-third of all ads viewed on the internet are Facebook ads. They are simple to create, cheap, can be highly targeted and, when used well, very effective. One of the simplest things you can use them for is to expand the reach of your social media accounts by targeting individuals who should be following, but haven’t taken the initiative to find you on their own.

For example, I recently placed some ads to try to increase “likes” on the official Southern New Hampshire University Facebook page. Targeting both alumni and current students was a no-brainer, so I set up a simple add to display for individuals with those affiliations but who were NOT connected to the page (no use in advertising to individuals already connected to you!)

Then I went a step further. If your school is like mine, than you probably have rogue Facebook pages that have popped up for admissions, alumni, athletics…you name it. Setting aside whether or not that is a good idea for the moment, take advantage of the audience they’ve attracted and reach out to them by targeting individuals who like a certain page.

The results speak for themselves. Within two weeks of starting the campaign, the number of likes on our Facebook page increased from 1,036 to 2,609, a 251% increase. We’re averaging about 100 new likes a day, compared to an average of 7 or 8 likes a day before the ads. That’s all for the price of a little over $200.

So clearly Facebook ads are a great way to reach an audience on Facebook…but what about other mediums? Recently I’ve been experimenting with them as a way of building followers on Twitter. The President of Southern New Hampshire University, Paul LeBlanc, had recently started tweeting again after a long absence. By pure coincidence, he happened to really kick it into gear on turing a trip to Saudi Arabia and was both tweeting and blogging up a storm. Paul brings such a unique perspective and personality to his writing and it’s something I really want to take advantage of. While he was in Saudi Arabia, I set up this Facebook ad, again targeted to individuals like current students and alumni.

I also set up this generic one to test against, which is still running today:

The result? Paul’s twitter follower count, which had been hovering at a bit over 100 followers for months, has over doubled to 223. The first ad, referencing his trip to Saudi Arabia, out performed the generic ad by double.

The moral of the story: Facebook ads are a cheap, effective way to build the reach of your social media accounts. They make it easy to test so you can try different types of messaging and see what works best. You only pay when people click on them, so worse comes to worse you get no clicks and free brand awareness. If they aren’t a part of your outreach campaign, they should be.

This post was written by Karlyn Borysenko