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You don’t need to spend money to raise awareness and sell on Facebook. Read these seven suggestions for how to advertise with no budget.
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Every year, companies increase their spending on social media ads. This year, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta is expected to surpass Google in digital ad revenue for the first time.
But you don’t need to spend money to connect with Facebook customers. Whether you’re launching your business or already running it, you can use several free advertising strategies to spread the word about your business on Facebook.
In this article, you’ll find seven suggestions for how to advertise on Facebook for free, with tips from entrepreneurs.
Here are seven free and low-cost ways to use Facebook to get the word out about your small business:
Businesses can sometimes procure free Meta ad credits to start advertising on Facebook and Instagram. There are three main ways to get these credits:
Through Meta business partners
Through Meta in-product promotions
Through Meta email promotions from facebookmail.com or priority.facebookmail.com
Note that Meta does not specify how it determines who receives credits through in-product or email promotions. And unlike Google, Meta does not have a nonprofit ad grant program.
To use free Meta ad credits, you need a Facebook business page and a Facebook Meta Ads Manager account.
In Meta Ads Manager, you can experiment with the following ad campaign features:
Campaign objectives such as awareness or traffic
Ad formats, including Reels ads and carousel ads
Incentives like free shipping or discounts
Audience targeting with lookalike audiences or Advantage+, Meta’s automated AI option
If you have a Shopify store, you can use your credits to create retargeting ads by installing the Meta pixel on your ecommerce website with the Facebook & Instagram app for Shopify. This line of code tracks user activity across your online store, giving you the information you need to serve users ads for products they’ve shown interest in.
When done well, organic social media can serve as free advertising. On Facebook, that means posting Reels. Reels give your brand a chance to appear in users’ Reels tab, a TikTok-like endless stream of videos from accounts they don’t necessarily follow.
Here are some tips from Facebook for creating engaging Reels that help you grow your audience:
Start a trend that users can participate in themselves
Add elements and effects like text and filters
Shoot vertical video
Add music
Use good lighting
Here is an example of a Reel with 5,700 views from tinned fish brand Fishwife. It shows a dish made with Fishwife smoked salmon and features good lighting, music, and vertical video shots.
Facebook also shares advice on what to avoid when creating Reels:
Blurry or low-resolution videos
Videos that clearly came from other apps (like watermarked content)
Videos with borders around them
You can use Reels as a free way to directly promote your products by tagging items that are in your Facebook Shop catalog and including a clear call to action (CTA). A Facebook Shop is an in-app storefront where users browse your products without leaving the Facebook platform. When shoppers are ready to check out, they’re directed to your ecommerce store.
If you’re on Shopify, you can download the Facebook & Instagram app to set up a Facebook Shop. This app syncs product information across your ecommerce store and Facebook Shop and lets you manage inventory and fulfillment from your Shopify admin.
To cultivate word-of-mouth marketing, invite your friends and family to share your business’s Facebook page and posts. Your content will then appear on the newsfeeds of those people’s friends. You can do the same and share business content on your personal profile to put it in front of your Facebook friends.
Sharing business information within personal networks like these can be especially helpful in encouraging brand trust. Eighty-four percent of consumers trust friends and family to give accurate information about a brand, according to a 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer report. By comparison, only 58% of consumers trust influencers to share accurate information.
Tique Chandler, founder of honey company Chandler Honey, shared content about her new business on her personal social media and asked friends and family to do the same.
“I don’t have a large following or anything, I’m just a regular person,” Tique says on Shopify Masters.
Tique attributes most of her $2,700 first-day sales and $16,000 first-month sales to word of mouth.
“If I had a tactical piece of business advice for new business owners, it would be to give away something for free if you can,” says Muammar Reed, cofounder of children’s bookstore and book fair facilitator MiJa Books.
Giving products away might not be entirely free, but it’s an accessible way to promote your business on social media. It can help you grow your social media following and email list, which, in turn, can translate into sales.
“If you give away something for free, people will give you information,” Muammar says. MiJa Books ran monthly book giveaways for teachers and librarians, then used the information required to enter the giveaway to send marketing emails and texts encouraging entrants to sign their school up for a book fair.
“There are links and CTAs throughout every single email to get people to our book fair landing page. So that’s generally how we take people from giveaway to trying to get them to book a fair,” Muammar says. He’s found giveaways to be one of the most successful sales funnels for the book fair business.
Facebook groups center on a common interest or shared location. Businesses can post in these groups to connect with their target audience.
On Shopify Masters, Divy Ojha, founder of the grocery delivery company Odd Bunch, says he used Facebook groups to advertise his business when he was first starting out. Divy joined a group for mothers and another for vegans, two audiences he wanted to target. He did particularly well in the mothers’ group.
Divy shared elements of his brand story, which helped his first post resonate. “People were commenting, ’This is a neat idea. It was started by a student. It has a feel-good factor. Maybe I’ll try it,’” says Divy. This led to Odd Bunch’s first sale.
Once you find a type of Facebook group that works, you can double down. “I went down this rabbit hole of joining virtually every mom group that existed in Southwestern Ontario,” says Divy. The strategy worked: Around 80% of Odd Bunch’s first customers came from local groups for mothers.
Encourage customers to recommend your Facebook page and leave a review by navigating to your profile and selecting the recommendation section under Details. They’ll be prompted to choose whether to recommend your business and leave a review. This is a form of social proof.
On Facebook, recommendation and review functions are intertwined. Before leaving a review, customers are asked if they recommend your business. They can select Yes or No. The percentage of people who select Yes appears in the Details section of your profile page.
Here’s an example from spice company Diaspora Co.:
Users can see what customers say about your business by selecting “90% recommend.” They’ll then see individual reviews with the names and profile photos of the reviewers.
Influencer seeding is when you give creators free products in the hopes they’ll post about your brand.
“They can post about it if they like the product, or they don’t have to post about it. But you’re not paying anything: You’re just giving them free product,” says Laura Thompson, cofounder of skincare brand Three Ships, on Shopify Masters.
Laura says the people who end up posting are the ones who love your brand. This leads to genuine user-generated content (UGC). “Seeding works very well because it’s authentic,” Laura says.
You can ask creators for permission to repost their content on your page. In this Facebook Reel, for example, a creator unboxes a package of Three Ships products gifted to them. Reposting UGC like this to your page is a form of social proof, since it shows potential customers that people like your brand enough to post about it.
You can also ask these creators to become affiliates, meaning they’ll promote your products in exchange for a commission on the sales they generate. This is what Three Ships did: They turned their influencer seeding strategy into an affiliate marketing program by recruiting creators who post about gifted products to become affiliates.
There typically are no free Facebook ads, although Meta occasionally offers free ad credits through business partners and in-product or email promotions. However, you can use free advertising and marketing strategies to gain attention on the platform without using Facebook ads.
Boosting Facebook posts is a paid feature, but you can organically boost posts by resharing them to your personal profile or in local community groups.
There are three ways to get free Facebook advertising credits: either through in-product promotions, in-email promotions, or Meta partnerships with other businesses. You can redeem these credits to run Facebook ads through Meta Ads Manager.
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