Facebook announced some major new initiatives on November 6th that take social network advertising in interesting directions. While there are no guarantees that they will be successful, these developments point in an interesting direction that others are also exploring.
Here's some background information on three new inter-related initiatives that create some new online performance marketing opportunities:
Pages:
Businesses, brands/products, bands, organizations and even famous people can now have "pages" which people can become "fans" of. These are free to any business or org and present the opportunity to interact directly with customers/fans. We're testing this ourselves with our DoubleClick Performics Facebook Page. If you like us, "fan" us!
Beacons:
Websites can give FB users the option of including in their "newsfeed" actions like rating a movie or buying a book or reserving a flight (for instance). Users can choose which items to send to Facebook or not.
Social ads:
Replacing their Facebook Flyers, Social Ads are profile-targeted ads. In other words, they can be targeted to FB users based on information in their profiles such as gender and location, but also interests ("kayaking" or "harry potter"), relationship status ("engaged" -> bridal registries!!), political views or workplace, in any combination.These ads become "social" when FB ties a fan to an ad to create an implied endorsement. If you've rated a movie on Blockbuster, for instance, one of your friends might see a newsfeed item saying "Cam rated 'Almost Famous' 1 star on Blockbuster" with a Blockbuster ad immediately below it. FB believes these fan endorsements will double conversion rates over typical banners.
Facebook also announced a dashboard called Insights to report data on page and campaign stats. An overview of all these features is available at www.facebook.com/business/. (I've also been tracking some of the detail these recent social networking marketing developments on my personal blog: www.web-cite.com.)
The sharing of favorite products and brands is similar to what social shopping sites have been exploring. Tying profile-targeted ads to these endorsements is interesting from an SEM and affiliate marketing perspective. As a Forrester analyst put it: "This could shift [Facebook] ad buying to large brands who have experience buying and managing search and direct response ads."
For this reason, we're following these developments closely and exploring the campaign and marketing strategy implications carefully. If you'd like to partner with us to "think forward" into this territory, either from an affiliate or search marketing perspective, please contact us via this form or your Performics representative.
Cam Balzer
VP, Emerging Media
