2007 showed phenomenal growth for “Facebook”, by the end of the year it had 7.6M active UK users, that’s 12.5% of the population. With so many active users participating on the social networking site some form of advertising system to target these users was inevitable.
Social networks such as Facebook create groups of niche users by gathering some personal information about them, such as hobbies, interests, marital status, and age. This information is primarily used to provide users with a compelling and interactive experience, but they also help build an advertising profile.
What these niche groups create is the opportunity to target very specific audiences with relevant ads which they may find interesting. As an advertiser you would expect more ROI or a higher click through rate if your ads were being served to pre qualified traffic.
Facebook’s ad platform consists of 3 major types of platforms, Facebook Pages, Facebook Social ads, and Facebook Beacon.
The basic principle of the advertising platform is similar to conventional platforms, using Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPM) pricing models.
I can imagine a lot of UK advertisers experimenting and trialing the Facebook ad system, and just as Facebook demonstrated phenomenal growth in 2007 I believe their ad system will prove very popular in 2008.
I expect users to be highly receptive to these form of ads, my first impressions are that the ads to not lower the user experience and because the ads are highly targeted the users see them less as advertising and more as recommendations.
If one of the user’s hobbies is listed as reading comic books and Formula 1 racing, then ads for Formula 1 merchandise and reviews about the newest comic book will be seen as recommendations rather than traditional advertising.
Remember Me