Facebook's New Ad Platform Opens Up A World Of Promotional Opportunities

All I've been reading about the past couple of days is Facebook's announcement, so I thought why not join the conversation and write about it here. Since I just wrote a post regarding a new promotional application that was developed for Facebook, and since I just recently became an "active" member,  I now can't stop thinking about all the new possibilities that have opened up.

For those that need a recap, Facebook announced on Tuesday a couple of new advertising platforms which I've taken the liberty to use descriptions from their blog. First is the launch of Facebook Pages, which are distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook. Users can express their support by adding themselves as a fan, writing on the page Wall, uploading photos, and joining other fans in discussion groups. It enables the page creator to send updates to their fans, add applications to their Page and engage the users with content such as videos, photos, reviews, etc . Creating a Facebook Page is free. Here's a Page for the Brand RED that's been created.

The second solution they launched is called Social Ads. Social Ads provide advertisements alongside related actions that a member's friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like "Leah is now a fan of The Offspring" (if I added The Offspring to my music) or "Justin wrote a review for Sushi Hut" (If Justin wrote this review on the Sushi Hut page). These actions could then be paired with an ad that either The Offspring or Sushi Hut provides. Here's a sample ad they provided:

Now these ads aren't free and can be bought by the number of clicks (CPC) or by the number of impressions (CPM). The advertiser will receive performance metrics from Facebook Insights including demographic data of who's engaging with the ad and feedback on how to optimize it.

Also, through a new service called Beacon, brands can alert Facebook members when their friends purchase one of their products or perform some form of action on their webdsite. For example, eBay can alert someone when one of their friends puts something up for sale or Blockbuster can tell someone that their friend just rented a specific movie.

Now there has been quite a bit of both positive and negative comments posted about these new advertising options. Some people think that it's an invasion of privacy and that some members may be signing up to become "fans" and not really understanding what they're getting into. Others are saying that the Facebook, social media types live in a fishbowl and won't mind sharing more of their personal preferences. That they'll love to find out what movies and books their friends are into. You can read some of these comments posted on MediaPost's Just an Online Minute blog from yesterday.

My first thoughts are that this will open up a wide use of new promotional applications similar to the Scratch-and-Win Photo card that I wrote about in my last post. Brands can now create interactive promotions that include sweepstakes, instant-win games and contests and put them on their Facebook Page. The Refer-A-Friend feature has been a very popular option with these types of interactive promotions currently running on websites and micro-sites and will now make its way into the social media networks. MySpace promotion pages have been becoming more and more popular add-ons for contests and other types of interactive promotions, so my guess is that we'll be seeing more promotions now including a Facebook Page.

So what do you think of all this? It's all pretty complicated to comprehend at first and I think to really understand it we'll need to both participate in it and keep up on what others are doing with it. So, let us know what you find or what you may be working on. The New York Times reported yesterday that Facebook has 60 advertisers already signed up as partners, and 100,000 new profiles were added to the site to promote products, bands and other interests. And of course that's just the very tip of the iceberg!

Comments

[Yvonne DiVita]

On the surface, this looks like a step in the right direction. But, I'm reserving my full decision until I understand it better. I think I may try it out a bit first, then see how it works. Thanks for writing about it ... your description helps.