As of the 11th of the April 2011, there are an estimated 425,720 people on Facebook who live in Jamaica and are age 18 and older. Of course we know that this amount is not exactly accurate since some of these pages have been abandoned, are actually businesses pretending to be persons and persons pretending to be other persons. Even if we round this figure down to 400,000 we are still looking at 1/7th of the population.

So what does it take to create a Facebook ad?

• Your ad image 110 high x 80 pixels wide
• The copy for the ad you may use up to 135 characters
• Your audience model (for effective segmentation)
• US enabled credit card or PayPal account and a budget of 1USD minimum

(Shameless plug – click here for a quotation to get started with social media marketing)

This fraction represents very healthy penetration for any medium in a given population, and I will hazard a guess that this makes Facebook the medium with the greatest marketing reach locally.
The numbers do not stop there and this is where social media as a marketing channel really flexes its muscles compare to other channels such as banner ads, SEO and traditional offline channels. Social media is built around the individual profile, a persons, age, sex, religion, likes and dislikes.

This enables any potential advertiser to segment their target market in ways that are unprecedented in terms of accuracy.

Let’s examine what we mean by that in greater details.

If you need to show your ads to Jamaican males 18 and over you are talking about roughly 196,740 persons, females 18 and over on the other hand number 222,400. Let’s create a fictitious ad and get even further into the numbers.

You are a revolutionary home car care product. You know from traditional in store purchases that your target market is 20-44 year old males. Plugging this information into Facebook you get 154,240 persons but it doesn’t stop there by adding ‘cars’ and ‘working on cars’ as filters that number is whittled down to 2,300. Now rather than paying to advertise to 196,740 person of which only 1 % is interested in your product you are able to pay and advertise to that 1%! Genius! And you could even get more specific than that, you could also filter by, the person’s relationship status, languages, they speak, Education even where they work currently or in the pass.

When you couple this level of focus with the fact that you can pay by click through (Pay only when someone clicks your ad) and that you can view detail statistics on the performance of individual ad units or the entire campaign, it is almost foolhardy NOT to advertise on Facebook.