Facebook + Advertising = No online advertising, but community engagement
7.5-cent CPM (thousand ad impression) for an ad campaign on Facebook with Lookery. Great news it’s cheap. But not very efficient. If we get for granted what says Eric Schonfeld from Techcrunch, 90%+ users don’t click on any particular ads. Moreover, Facebook recently added a thumbs-up/ thumbs-down application below each ad to get some more feedbacks on the reason nobody’s clicking. Do you Facebook guys really don’t know why? Hey, you’ve just created a crazy engaging social networks. That’s for that sole reason we manage to help people not care about ads. And that’s the reason you should definitly focus on creating an advertising platform to help companies engage with their consumers, with a fee based on subscribers. Or companies should take time to develop it by themselves. It’s not that complicated.
Though it’s not complicated, it means you should reassign some money from your online advertising budget to creating a new line: social networks advertising. Whether you’re on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, or any blogs, you’re strategy has to be aligned with the reason they’re on these community platform: have fun. If you don’t get it, just focus on other moments of the digital life to get noticed by consumers. Did you ever think people there to watch (did I say do some voyeurism? my excuses) and interact with friends can be interested that easily by ads for Dell, Summer University, and other P&G or Unilever products? You can’t put any call to action banner when there are so much more to see and do like joining groups of friends, watching personal photos of friends of friends, flirting with unknown people, … ?
If you want to get noticed, you have to stop being in the advertising frame of these websites, and be in the lifestreams of people. That’s why smart companies are creating groups of interests, leading them by feeding with interesting content, and have some Fan Pages in Facebook. Ok I know, that way of working means you have to work a little, briefing your communication agency so that they find a breaking idea they have found on Facebook, though asking for a small picture to put in Facebook. But you guys do really want to pay $300 for 2 million pages and get a collegues mocking you because they found your ad on the right of a personal photo entitled “These guys are crap”, or to say to your boss you’ve spend 10 time more money monitoring and calculating the ROI than what the campaign has delivered.
In social networks, the deal requested by consumers is entertainment. They get used to the Internet for entertainment and subjects they’re deeply linked with (which may be related to entertainment?). You won’t be able to change that deal suggesting them to switch from entertainment to online payment or enrollment. Create stickiness and then you’ll be able to make them pay for you. That’s a flirting strategy, or as they say “community engagement”.
Photo Credit: View-askew
Fast.Fwd.Innovation Weekly Takeway - Fast.Fwd.Innov@tion | August 18th, 2008 at 10:35 am #
[...] Facebook + Advertising = No online advertising, but community engagement [...]
Media planning = Should company create content or buy online ads? - Fast.Fwd.Innov@tion | August 20th, 2008 at 2:08 am #
[...] 7.5 cent CPM for Facebook advertising, low efficiency. Interuption marketing using IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) format like transparent flash one (with a hidden close button) that are overlaying the website content. Advertising click rate from 2 to 0.5% for traditional Internet advertising. Newsletter opening under 5%. That are stats we can see every day if companies were to display their Internet advertising efficiency rates. And that’s the main reason why there are so many media planning companies, telling companies they can change the world. And they can. Maybe. But some companies are starting another way to generate advertising aiming at being the content and not the attached advertising people don’t even notice. [...]