November 20, 2007 – 4:28 pm
When Facebook released their Mini-Feed, the community pushed back. They felt it to be intrusive and annoying. Marketers, however, are in love with it. If any Facebook member uses branded content on Facebook, such as TripAdvisor’s Cities I’ve Visited, the information is sent virally to all of the members friends. It allows for automatic organic growth via the viral nature of social networking Web sites. That’s a dream for marketers. Facebook even gives branded content a word-of-mouth creditbility without needing friends to tell people. When a user clicks on TripAdvisor’s App, they see which of their friends have installed the Cities I’ve Visited on their page - giving the content an automatic third party endorsement.
MediaPost’s Search Insider posted an article today that explores Facebook’s three main search options that marketers are taking advantage of: News Feeds, Ad Space and Sponsored Stories.
By David Berkowitz, MediaPost’s Search Insider
Imagine if Picasso painted a search engine results page from Google. It would probably wind up looking like Facebook, which continually draws inspiration from search engines as it rolls out its services for marketers.
What Facebook did was take the classic search channels of paid search, natural search, and paid inclusion and adapt them to its own platform. Compared to search, Facebook’s ad targeting isn’t quite as precise as advertising to people who explicitly express interest with their queries. Yet compared to contextual advertising, Facebook offers the proposition of targeting to explicitly expressed interests on members’ profiles, and marketing is further amplified with the web of member connections often described as the “social graph.” … READ ENTIRE ARTICLE
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