Advertising through Facebook – Should or shouldn’t you?

A couple of months back Facebook unveiled its new advertising platform. This new platform allows you to tap into the rapidly expanding Facebook audience in a ways you could not do before.

Hi, I’m Jeff Goodman a New York based IT consultant and today I thought of taking a look at the new Facebook advertising platform.

Advertisers can now have their very own corporate pages on Facebook. Kellogg’s can now have a Facebook presence, and I can “like” Kellogg’s and also be friends with Kellogg’s. From a company point of view, it sounds nice. But from a Facebook user point of view, unless I’m going to get a substantial discount or going to benefit in some other exciting way, why on Earth would I want to be friends with or “like” Kellogg’s especially since it would make me appear goofy to my real friends or they might think I’m an agent for Kellogg’s and in turn shun me?

However, the one thing that is exciting is demographic targeting of your social media marketing services. Facebook has some 20 million or so users. As an advertiser, you can target specific groups of people based on gender, age, hobbies, relationship status, education level, political leaning and interests. For example, you could place an ad specifically targeting 112,000 Facebook users who have mentioned the word “gadgets” somewhere in their profile. This is by far the best targeting system I have ever seen.

Another cool aspect of advertising with Facebook is the Social viral advertisement. Let’s say I just bought a book from a site that has links to Facebook. My Facebook news feed might say something like “Jeff Goodman has just purchased ……” Curious friends who read the news feed might be tempted to click on the link and check out the book for themselves and perhaps also buy it. The underlying concept is that a friend’s recommendation can be used as a powerful advertising tool. For Social Media Marketing consultants and Search Engine Marketing Consultants such as me, this new concept was quite exciting so we ran a small test project on Facebook.

What we found out was not very exciting – less than 1% clicked the ads. If I had 200 friends and of these, only 1 clicked the advertisement, then obviously that ad was not being very effective. The “hook” somehow needs to be more enticing than “Jeff Goodman has just purchased ……” Also, we need to realize that Facebook users are not searching for product information they are seeking to network and communicate with friends or colleagues and are not in the mindset to seek and buy. So I just wonder if even highly targeted ads are going to do the trick.

I think Facebook users have not yet come to accept corporate presence amongst them. When you go for a party you’re there to have a good time amongst your friends – not to be accosted and asked to buy a product. So will Facebook advertisement ever take off in ways that would be cost effective for advertisers? I guess only time will tell.

While inaugurating social media marketing Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said “the next hundred years will be different for advertising” Wow, if that’s the time frame he is looking at, then who knows?

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