Hi,

When it comes to building brand awareness there's absolutely no better tool than Facebook. It's the only tool that offers such laser-precise targeting, from age, gender, location, to workplace, industries, interests and bahaviours - and that is truly necessary for making the most of a small advertising budget.

Your goal, however, shouldn't be just raising brand awareness but achieving specific goals: if you want to generate leads, send people to your website and use a lead magnet to make them sign up or create a custom tab for the same, if you want to build a community, use Facebook ads to promote *offline* events and start building the audience there - it's crucial for you to identify those potential brand ambassadors and engage them as much as possible at the start, so that they become the advocates for your startup and help you to expand the community. If the startup is purely online based however, you'll need to identify those wow factors and put in place techniques that could increase the word of mouth and social sharing for the site.

An alternative that I could think of, is finding a site that's already established in that area and agreeing with them on a CPM model advertising. It can be effective sometimes, but you wouldn't know exactly the target audience you're reaching. So I would definitely go with Facebook!

I hope that helps, and if you'd like to have a chat on how to use the most out of Facebook advertising (target audience selection, ad campaigns split-testing and optimasation, lead generation, remarketing, etc), feel free to get in touch - I've been specialising in Facebook advertising for the past few years and I'm confident I'd be able to assist you.

Cheers!
Adomas