The vendor iConstituent is rolling out a new tool that could help members of Congress enhance their Facebook presence and interactions with the people they represent.

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Interaction between lawmakers in Congress and constituents has grown 300 percent through the use of Facebook ads.

That’s based on data from legislative e-communications firm iConstituent. The Washington, D.C., based firm works  with more than 90 lawmakers on Capitol Hill and other elected officials in executing their Facebook advertising, which is aimed at the people they serve in their congressional districts.

Among the Facebook study’s other findings with respect to congressional offices and Facebook ads:

With more than 800 million Facebook users and 42 percent of adults on the social networking site, it’s a critical tool for lawmakers, companies, really any major brand, to engage with key audiences.  Especially since many lawmakers are in the nation’s Capital a majority of the time when Congress is in session.

Paul Bell, director of new media for Congresswoman Karen Bass, a Democrat from California, told us earlier this year that Facebook ads play a key role in growing Facebook followers.  He added that the ads can also incite action on behalf of a particular bill and allow his office to engage with a broader cross-section of constituents.

What do you think of congressional offices’ use of Facebook ads to reach constituents?

Growth in local merchants’ use of Facebook ads has tapered off a bit.

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For Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass, whose district encompasses part of the Los Angeles area, using Facebook is one way she bridges the distance from Washington, D.C., to the West coast and her constituents.

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Over the past year, a growing number of companies have launched on top of the Facebook ads application programming interface, enabling larger advertisers to scale their Facebook advertising campaigns. Today, XA.net entered the market with the launch of optim.al, a multivariate ad platform.
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A couple weeks ago we posted our thoughts on the discussion of whether to use CPM or CPC when bidding on Facebook ads. After doing further research on the topic, I’ve decided that it would be useful to post an update. The primary update is that while there is still value from using CPM ads, using CPC is much better for initial testing. Here’s a more comprehensive overview.
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Today the partnership between Facebook and PayPal on Facebook Credits and ads has been expanded from a small segment of Facebook advertisers to cover all advertisers on the social network. Now, any advertiser can use PayPal to pay for ads through Facebook’s online advertising tool. As we discussed back in February, this strategic partnership is part of a long-term vision of monetization that Facebook has been slowly rolling out.
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This morning, Facebook launched a new area of the site to explain how to use the company’s ad platform effectively. It’s a comprehensive resource which breaks down to the details of things like ad creative, scheduling your ads, analyzing reports about ad performance, and more. Additionally, there is a pre-recorded webinar of how Facebook Ads work.
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Facebook is making a small but profound change to Facebook Ads: “Keywords” will now be known as “Likes and Interests.” The change will be visible in the Facebook Ads interface starting the week of March 8th.  While the change is purely semantic, it gives us a key insight into how Facebook plans to revolutionize online advertising.
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