Archive for January, 2011

Advertising goes social

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

Looking to make your Facebook promotions more effective? Facebook advertising, thanks to its highly targeted nature, can be one of the most effective ways for you to kick-start your promotion and ensure its success. In a recent survey, it has been found that Facebook Advertisement is the number one way of informing potential fans about your page and promotions running on your page.

What it holds?

Facebook advertising is still a relatively new offering and marketers are just beginning to understand how to use these advertisements most effectively. Like any other advertising, Facebook ads also target people in order to get them to react to the communication and visit the brand’s Facebook page. Where Facebook ads score above the other form of advertising is that it is more personal, more flexible and almost always comes with a friend’s recommendation.

Why Facebook Ads should be used?

Facebook is about relationship marketing, not direct sales. Facebook Ads can help transform existing advertising into messages that are tailored to the individual user based on how their friends interact and affiliate with the brands, music artists, and businesses they care about.

More importantly, Facebook Ads give the brand a borrowed voice of a friend which can help build a long lasting relationship for the brand.

Where You Find them?

When users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. This is where Engagement ads are posted and get the maximum eyeballs since there is no other ad on the page.

Engagement ads

Engagement ads are above-the-fold home page ads that integrate naturally within the user’s experience. Engagement ads appear in the right-hand column and can generate social stories in Feed. The ads allow your brand to share and connect with users on the home page. These ads are generally floated by a Facebook Media Buying agency.

Since there is a premium attached to these ads, a lot of smaller organizations opt for self serve ads.

Rest-of-site Ad/ Self Serve Ads

Facebook rest-of-site ads appear throughout the site, but not on the home page. Facebook rest-of-site ads for Pages and Events allow users to engage with ads in the same way they interact with other content on Facebook without leaving the page they’re viewing. Actions taken within the ad can generate organic stories in friends’ home pages. These ads can be developed and posted by anyone.

How they look?

The Facebook Ads give the advertiser the options of generating different types of ads based on the feature integrated in the ads.

Video Comment Engagement Ad

Watch video and comment. The ad unit allows users to leave inline comments on the video without leaving the home page. What’s more, users can also like the brand inline, without interrupting the video.

Event Engagement Ad

RSVP and invite others to join. The ad unit expands to invite friends to the event when one of the 3 RSVP options are selected. Friends who are attending the event are listed within the ad unit, as well as the total number of Facebook attendees. This increases the trust and likelihood of the user to engage in the ad. The act of RSVP-ing to the event is public and may appear in friends’ home pages. After RSVP-ing to the event, the user has the option to like the brand.*

Like Engagement Ad

If the user’s friends already like the brand, the ad unit provides relevant social context. This endorsement increases both the user’s trust in the brand and the likelihood that the user will engage with the ad unit and like the brand themselves. If none of the user’s friends currently like the brand, the ad unit displays the total number of people who like the brand at that time.

Poll Engagement Ad

Answer a poll and see how others voted. The ad unit asks a question with 2 or 3 responses. When the user selects a response, the poll results appear. These results reflect the answers of all Facebook users who have answered the poll. The user can also click to see how their friends voted or like the brand.*

Facebook’s Ad revenue hit $1.86B in 2010. Worldwide spending on social networks is expected to rise 71.6% in year 2011 to $5.97 billion, of which $4 billion will be spent just on Facebook Ads!!! This surely is a very potent medium which has great scope of growing to one of the biggest medium.

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Social Media Marketing | 5 Comments »

The virtual world gets a new currency

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

It is often said that if Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country in terms of population behind China and India. For a country of this size, it is but natural to have a currency of its own. No wonder, Facebook Credits are fast becoming the dollar equivalent in the virtual world.

The new world economy

Facebook Credits are a virtual currency that users can use to buy virtual goods in many games and apps on the Facebook platform. Currently users can use Facebook Credits to purchase premium items in popular games and apps like CityVille, FarmVille, Cafe World, EA Sports FIFA Superstars etc.

The new banking system

You can purchase Facebook Credits using your credit card, PayPal, or a mobile phone. The Facebook Games Dashboards displays your available balance. You can directly purchase credits from the dashboards also. A lot of games also have the option to let you purchase directly.

The goal with Facebook Credits is to give people that use Facebook an easy, convenient and trusted way to buy premium items in games and applications, while creating unique opportunities for developers to build successful, sustainable businesses. Facebook Credits are now used in more than 200 games and applications on Facebook from more than 75 developers.

The global impact

What this means is, with more than 500,000 applications on Facebook, and millions of virtual goods within those applications (particularly games), applications have become an increasingly valuable part of the user experience. And Facebook Credits is the currency that makes purchasing these virtual items across applications possible in a fast and simple manner.

Generally it’s free to play the games on Facebook but users can get ahead if they pump in actual money to buy virtual goods. With 200 million people playing games on Facebook every month, according to the site’s own figures, it only takes a small proportion of paying customers to generate healthy revenue.

With the likes of Zynga, the biggest social game company and developers of Cityville and Farmville, signing to deal in Facebook Credits in their games, it has cemented Facebook Credits economic strength. Industry estimates say that Zynga has brought in between $500 million to $700 million in revenue this year from the sale of virtual goods. That is a lot of money spent in a virtual world. And if Zynga is to make Facebook Credits as its official currency for these games, Facebook Credits can soon become the desired currency world over.

Emerging Trend

This has already led to Facebook Credits debuting  in real world. Facebook began selling Facebook Credit gift cards at Target stores earlier this year, but with the holiday season approaching, it decided to land on the shelves of WalMart and Best Buy. Facebook Credits have been on store shelves from September 2010 and were ranked as one of the most desired holiday seasons gift.

Opportunity for engagement

With more and more people spending time on these games and purchasing virtual world gifts using the Facebook Credits, this could be good bait for brands to attract more fans to their pages. It is a given fact that a lot of people join brand pages for deals and offers. A lot of them join in order to win the contest run by these brands. While they are on these pages, these users are more active on the social games. With their favourite brands giving Facebook Credits as gifts for various contests that run on these brand pages will only make them more loyal fans of the page.

(source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/study-reveals-why-consumers-fan-facebook-pages/)

Not only that, with Facebook Credits easily becoming available for users, brands can look at adopting FB Credits as a viable ecommerce solution on Facebook. Though this system is not yet in place, a real world and a virtual world economy tie up cannot be ruled out. Knowing that a certain amount of FB Credits are worth a specific amount, the same conversion can be used to sell real products through Facebook.

The idea may sound radical but the growth of Facebook has lead to many changes in the brick and mortar structure of our society. More and more people are becoming citizens of the Facebook country. It is not just an imagination that soon there would be a virtual world with real transactions happening with Facebook Credits.

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Social Media Marketing | 1 Comment »