With the holiday shopping season about to blast off and Small Business Saturday on tap this weekend, Facebook offered five tips for small and midsized businesses that are using the social network for marketing purposes.

Facebook’s five tips for SMB marketers are:

Plan ahead: Organize Facebook campaigns around popular holidays to make ads more timely and engaging. Choose holidays that are most relevant to your business, and schedule ads in advance.

Use link ads: Take people from your ads to your site in just one simple click with link ads. Link ads featuring large, clickable images, text and call-to-action buttons seamlessly direct people from their mobile devices or desktops to any page on your site. Tips on how to use link ads can be found here.
Improve your creative: Create eye-catching, holiday-themed posts. Include bright images, clear and concise language and smooth transitions to your site.

Target your ads: Facebook provides you with tools to help you target and reach the right customers — new and existing — at the right time. Target your ads based on age, gender, location, interests, behaviors and more. Test different content, images and promotions for separate audiences to see what works. Learn about basic targeting options available here.

Know what’s working, change what isn’t: Take advantage of Facebook’s Ads Manager to monitor and track the success of your ads performance. Ads Manager allows you to optimize your budget, test your strategy and measure your return on investment.

Source: David Cohen