No question FaceBook advertising bears little resemblance to Search Advertising. However, we are starting to see some great success stories of companies success with FaceBook advertising. Nevertheless, FaceBook’s advertising model may be seriously flawed.
If you ever accessed Facebook using one of their mobile applications; perhaps you noticed something missing. There are no ads.
Most 30-40 year old women (one of the most coveted and powerful consumer groups) access their Facebook accounts usinge their mobile device.
While I agree that FaceBook needs a native iPad app, for the sake of their business, I think they first need to find a way to make sure all those current mobile users interact with ads.
As my good friend, Avinash pointed out in his 11 Digital Marketing “Crimes Against Humanity”, there are 6.9 billion homo sapiens on the planet and 3.7 billion of them actively use 4.3 billion mobile phones.
You hardly ever have to worry about keeping up with your competition if you keep up with your audience. Facebook is not keeping up with their audience and all companies do this at their own peril.
So do you agree that there might be a problem here?
I agree there is definitely a lost marketing opportunity here. However, if I were Facebook I'd be cautious of how far you go with advertising. There has to be some sort of economy of scale for which users will start to leave as advertising continues to swarm the user experience and community. Would love to see data to disprove these very broad assumptions.
Yes, definitely. Facebook has a number of issues to resolve with their advertising systems.
Arguably foremost among them is the inability to show really relevant ads to people: I actually like ads because I like learning about new products I might want to buy but the ads usually just crummy dating sites or completely irrelevant to anything I want to purchase.
The other major advertising problem that Facebook has is an institutional problem with not understanding what businesses want. Businesses are desperate for credibility (fans) so agencies like http://facebook.popularfans.com are emerging strictly to get Business Pages more Facebook fans. Something along these lines is something they would do well to emulate.
Despite all of these issues, Facebook has such a large amount of traffic that they’ll still be able to clean house and make a lot of money, but there’s a lot of wasted potential there with regards to technical issues (ad algorithms) and business focus (getting businesses more credibility).
I think Google threatening Facebook is a complete non-issue though. Google is so far away from getting social stuff that they will never understand what is going on and create something that threatens Facebook’s status as the cool new thing. Somebody else might come up with something, but not Google.
Some great points Richard.
Bryan,
I remember experiencing this first hand awhile back when I purchased a Facebook ad on my sister's birthday as a lark/experiment. The ad was very tightly targeted just to her, and I was sure she'd see it, but when I called her on her on the big day, she'd never seen it because she spent most of her Facebook time on her iphone!
I've long felt that Facebook should adopt a "Burma Shave" strategy for inserting the ads into the newsfeed of mobile phones. Might require something of a "hard sell" to get the advertisers to buy in, but I don't think it would bother users at all, so long as the ads had were minimally clever/tasteful/relevant.
- Jeff
Well said, Jeff. Wow, great story to illustrate too. We've become used to all manner of ads on free mobile apps – it's about time Facebook jumped on board, given how active their mobile users are!
Hey Bryan – really good points here!! I agree with you that Facebook is for sure behind the eight-ball on their mobile marketing.
I often use the Facebook mobile app News Feed as an example of how your fan page content is getting seen more often than on the web – because the default is always all stories: Most Recent vs. Top News. More than 250 million of Facebook's near 700 million users access Facebook via their mobile devices… and they are *twice* as active as web users!
At one of the recent press conferences (the theme was mobile), an audience member asked Mark Zuckerberg when he was going to come out with an app for the iPad. Zuck's response was that the iPad wasn't a mobile device, it's a computer. LOL. Hmmmm, not sure I agree on that one. There's a *lot* more room on an iPad to serve ads!
Btw, interesting to see targeted ads are now being rolled out based on user data in status updates, posts and comments – and they show up pretty much real time. Amazing.
The new targeted ads are another great opportunity and certainly another interesting ad innovation from FaceBook. Thanks for adding in the additional stats regarding the most active users.
From Zuckerberg's comment it is obvious he doesn't get that touch changes the experience
I'm torn on this issue.
I do think FaceBook is missing a huge opportunity by not implementing ads on their mobile applications. Though, as a user, I really enjoy the advertisement free experience that the mobile version provides.
I agree Facebook still needs to do a lot of work and experiment & test with Ad Space on Mobile. I wonder if their team is looking into it. In the era of smartphones, people are talking about shifting some of marketing dollars from Online to Mobile (similar to how some of TV spending is gradually shifting to Online). Nice Quick Article.
PS: I subscribed to your blog few days ago by email and it does not open up properly even with the email link. Should I use any particular browser to read the post. Thanks.
It should work in all browsers. Wait until the update next week and let me know if that still doesn't work please.