Facebook advertising a serious contender?? you betcha!
With its demographic targeting superior to virtually any other website, plus immense numbers of daily and repeat visitors, Facebook is becoming a serious contender for sponsored advertising. Already making significant inroads and increasing in numbers every day, it could even trouble the guys at Google AdWords for the coveted B2C marketplace!
When you think about it, visitor statistics and browsing patterns can be a rather grey area. Google addresses this in many ways via its excellent Analytics service, but there’s no denying that these stats are essentially the result of historic and ‘anonymous’ computer usage, albeit based on IP addresses and well-tracked click activity.
Facebook would argue that it too knows exactly what people are clicking on and when, but crucially it also knows who. Not only who, but many personal attributes of that surfer such as their age, address, preferences – even hobbies and of course friends! These can prove pretty powerful nuggets of information for the marketer who wants to target a particular sector and avoid ‘wasted’ exposure. Look at this real-life example of a successful Facebook campaign for a Wedding Photographer, attracted by just such targeting parameters.
See what I mean? Powerful stuff. Of course, through Google you can choose your geographic area and in an ideal world, people who are not 'obviously' interested in your ads won’t click on them anyway. But that is a different scenario, because Facebook’s offering is all about who is seeing the ads in the first place, not wasting impressions - and knowing you will hit your audience. There are also some demographic targeting options within the AdWords system, but it’s fair to say that these are not only far less accurate, they are real ‘under the bonnet’ work on a campaign set-up missed by many, as apposed to a standard feature. The launch of iGoogle does offer some voluntary information that can be used in targeting, but I just don't think it's got the numbers Facebook, let alone the fan devotion!
Traffic versus Visitors – the ultimate ‘Time Sink’
It’s also fair to say that Google is the ultimate ‘springboard’ website, quickly encouraging you to ping-away from their super-fast search results and onto your target destination. That means although visitor numbers to Google may be huge, but they are often gone in an instant.
But recent numbers released by research company Nielsen confirm Facebook is the web’s number-one ‘time sink’. Perhaps more interesting, is just how much more time we spend on the world’s largest social network today than we did six months ago! Back in June 2009, Nielsen estimated that the average user spent four hours and 39 minutes on Facebook per month. That’s about 9.3 minutes per day in a 30-day month. In August, that number rose to five hours and 46 minutes, or 11.5 minutes per day.
In January 2010, though, the amount of time the average person spent on Facebook jumped to more than seven hours. Each Facebook user spent an average of 421 minutes on Facebook per month, which amounts to more than 14 minutes per day.
Even if you lump together the time spent on Google (1:23hrs), Yahoo (2:09hrs), YouTube (1:02 hrs), Microsoft/Bing (1:35 hrs) Wikipedia (0:15 hrs) and Amazon (0:22 hrs) it still doesn’t beat Facebook!
What This Means
There is a one big ‘but’ in Google’s favour. Google’s jewel in the crown is that it still retains over 90% of the Internet users search traffic, and would naturally argue that its monster market-share captures more direct surfer enquiries than any other website - and by a massive and seemingly unbeatable margin. And as I write this in May 2010, Facebook enjoys nothing like the search-based advertising revenue from Google.
However, cross selling, incidental exposure, targeted advertising – all these things combine to produce massive numbers of online sales and this is where Facebook could win. Just think how appealing it is when buying on Amazon, and it says ‘you may like this’ and you think ‘yeah, I do like that actually!’ and go on to buy it. We’ve all done it! Could this familiarity and increasingly personal-based advertising prove to be Facebook’s ace in the hole? One thing is for sure, it certainly cannot be dismissed as just a platform for virtual friendships.
Facebook and the Future – Open Graph
We hear a lot about Google’s domination, but take a quick gasp at some Facebook numbers. There are now more than 400 million people on Facebook, four times as many as there were a year or so ago. And it took just a year for Facebook Connect to have 100 million users on both mobile devices and Websites. And now it seems the trend will only increase...
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the company's F8 developer conference in April 2010 to unveil what he said is "the most transformative thing we've ever done for the Web." It's called the Open Graph.
Open Graph intends to pioneer ‘social plug-ins’, linking feeds, news, content and user experiences from major sites and resources all over the world. Facebook plans to connect disparate corners of the Web that other social sites are building. "Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to small businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to music," Zuckerberg said. "If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, then we can create a Web that's smarter, more social, more personalised, and more semantically aware."
"These connections aren't just happening on Facebook, they're happening all over the Web, and today with the Open Graph we're bringing all these things together," Zuckerberg said.
"We're going to make it possible to make those connections," Zuckerberg said. For example, a "news feed" item about a Yelp review of a restaurant could bring up more information about the restaurant and which of a user's Facebook friends have been there. “We're going to connect all of those different graphs together to form the Open Graph, and when we connect all of those graphs together, the Web is going to get a whole lot better!"
So one thing is clear, Facebook intends to build on its ‘powerhouse’ status. My advice is basically ‘be there, or be square’. It seems that if you’re not part of the revolution, you could quickly fall into obscurity…
Why not talk to us about your presence on the Internet, and about using social advertising and media to your immediate advantage!? - you'll be glad you did...