Facebook Announces New Ad Strategy
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 6, 2007 | Share This
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg today announced the social network’s ad strategy. Facebook Ads lets marketers build profile pages similar to those of individual users, which means companies can befriend users and get entry into their news feeds. It will also integrate ads with user actions, creating hybrid “social ads” that will act as instant friend recommendations for brands - and, Facebook is betting, will lead to conversions for marketers. Facebook Ads will also include an element called “Insights,” which basically sounds like an analytics dashboard.
Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester has written an extensive analysis of the implications of this kind of personalized targeting, which will also be happening on MySpace. He argues it’s giving rise to the “fan-sumer,” which is not a particularly new concept except but has just been effectively harnessed by social networks:
Going beyond just profile matching of advertisements, Facebook allows consumers to self-identify with brands and becoming fans. In turn, brands can use these “Fan-Sumers” as endorsers to their own trusted networks, resulting in trusted word-of-mouth. Brands can also self-manage their own campaigns, and there’s some unique opportunities for eCommerce widgets or applications to be part of this formula.
A second, and arguably more interesting, part of the announcement today was that of Beacon, which partners with sites for “social distribution,” allowing users of both Facebook and partner sites to add non-Facebook activity to their news feeds. For instance, users of eBay, which is one of the partners, can include their auction listings. This particular partnership sounds like it may undermine Facebook’s classified listings section, Marketplace, but other companies that have signed on include Fandango and Travelocity, allowing users to share movie and travel plans, respectively.
Because so much user engagement on Facebook begins in news feeds and thus targeted advertising coming from your friends seems far more effective, Beacon is a logical extension of third-party profile widgets. Even better, like adding a widget to Facebook, Beacon will be free (according to TechCrunch liveblogging), not counting development dollars on the marketer’s end. No word yet on what other elements of Facebook Ads cost.
Topics: Advertising: Behavioral, Advertising: Contextual, Facebook, Social Media |