I would first like to say kudos to Facebook on their new advertising releases. Ever since the beginning I’ve seen Facebook’s ability to hand the 18-25 year old college student demographic to advertisers and brands on a silver platter. It was such a pure section of that market that it would have been hard for messaging not to stick. When Facebook opened the system to general users I was on the fence about it, yes it’s good to increase your user base on such a solid application but it could have lost the whole reason why so many people started using it in the first place, the college feel to it. The problem then was that you couldn’t just put up the same old ads for a college student as a 40 something businessman; it just won’t work the same.
Social Ads solves that problem. What Social Ads does is, not only does it target the user with ads based on their profile information, but it also has a user’s friends do the advertising for the brands. Integration this into the user’s news feed allows for noninvasive ads while still allowing the content to be noticed, digested, and spread virally. It relies on the trusted friend-to-friend interactions between users to inform users about a particular brand. It easily allows users to constantly digest the data rather than being bombarded by pitches constantly. They have also allowed users to bring actions back into Facebook via the news feed. I’m assuming that it will only work with the brands that have partnerships with Facebook through Social Ads. For example, adding a movie to your queue on Blockbuster.com will trigger your news feed to display the information. These stories won’t be automatic either “Affiliate websites always notify you of any stories they want to send, and you’ll have two opportunities—one on the website, and one on Facebook—to opt out of that story. Facebook always gives you the choice to decline a story the next time you log in.” ( Facebook Blog )
A piece of Social Ads, codenamed “Beacon” is the ability to allow brands to create profile pages for their products and allow users to interact with these pages in many the same ways they do for other users. I’ve always wanted to be Travelocity, Blockbuster, and NYTimes.com’s friends. Now people can show their appreciation and do the work for the advertisers. Who are you more likely to listen to, the TV or your friends? Pretty easy answer and Facebook has hit it right on the nose.
Finally the last piece of Facebook’s advertising trifecta, Insights. This is the analytical part of this whole deal. It provides statistics on who is engaging the brand’s with Social Ads and how. It will allow for better Social Ad targeting and optimization and will allow brands to create relevant more solid campaigns to hit their desired markets.
By no means am I an advertising know-it-all, trust me far from it, but I do think that Facebook is heading in the right direction so long as they maintain a balance that will satisfy both the brands and the users. As of now with what I have seen from their unobtrusive and targeted ad placement I think Facebook will do what’s right. Not going to lie, I wish I had thought of it 2 years ago, I would probably have some bikini clad supermodel typing out my blog posts as I dictate them from my yacht.
