Facebook Ads will assist businesses to directly connect with users, target customized ads and gain insights into its presence and promotion. Facebook Ads system has three parts to it. In the first part, marketers can build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences. They can add multiple content such as photos, videos, music and Facebook platform applications. Additionally, it also allows outside application developers to enhance Facebook pages.
In the second part, an ad system disburses brand messages. These advertisements get distributed through social graph, a network that connects people and helps them communicate and share information.
In the third part, an interface gathers insights into people’s activity on Facebook through its insights service, which provides business insights such as access to data on activity, fan demographics, ad performance and trends that better equip marketers to improve custom content. Facebook Insights is a free service for all Facebook pages and ‘Social Ads’.
Combining these three features together, Facebook’s Ads is likely to present a better choice to advertisers targeting online communities and pose a new challenge to News Corp’s MySpace and Google.
Facebook’s ad system will generate social ads that combine social actions from friends, such as purchase of a product or review of a restaurant with an advertiser’s message. This feature enables advertisers to deliver more customized ads to its target audience. Users also have the flexibility not to share their personal information with advertisers while creating a Social Ads.
By means of this new system, users can share information about businesses with their friends and act as referrals. Further, users can interact directly with the business through Facebook page by adding reviews, uploading photos, and any of such applications enabled by the marketers. These actions could be performed through mini-feed and news feed tools on Facebook that allow users to share information with their friends. The new system also ensures that users see only those social Ads, which are targeted at them.
On the day of introduction, more than 100,000 new Facebook pages were launched, including largest brands, local businesses, organizations and bands.
Earlier in October 2007, Microsoft acquired a minority stake in Facebook, for approximately $15 billion, to mine user profiles for valuable ad data.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
