Converge Weekly

II. Tools for Advertisers

For marketers with a budget, Facebook offers both integrated and self-serve solutions to reach broader slices of the Facebook audience. Depending on your budget, you can get started as an advertiser on Facebook with as little as a few dollars for a short-run flyer or as much as several hundred thousand dollars for a customized “sponsored group” destination inside Facebook.

11. Social Ads

Social Ads replaced Facebook Flyers in November 2007 at the same time Facebook launched Pages. With Social Ads, Facebook offers advertisers the option to pay on a CPC or CPM basis, whichever they prefer. Social Ads offers very powerful targeting capabilities: when you create your ad, you have the option to limit who sees your ad by age, sex, location, keywords, education level, workplaces, political views, and relationship status.

Social Ads is completely self-serve and provides real time feedback on the size of your target audience and the suggested bid range to achieve impressions. While Facebook doesn’t guarantee your budget will be reached, I can’t imagine they’re anywhere close to filling their inventory.

12. Integrated Opportunities

If you represent a large account, Facebook has partnered with Microsoft to serve advertisers with higher campaign budgets (above around $50,000).

13. Beacon

Beacon is Facebook’s new program (launched in November 2007) that allows partners to send Facebook information about the activities Facebook users do on partner websites, in order to be published inside Facebook via the Mini Feed and News Feed. For example, Amazon might use Beacon to send a feed item to Facebook about a book you just bought.

14. Polls

Polls offer an easy way for marketers to quickly conduct research within their targeted audience. Results are streamed in real time to a dashboard that allows marketers to break down results by gender and age. Based on your targeting preferences, you can get hundreds of responses within an hour.

15. Facebook Platform Ad Networks

When Facebook launched the Facebook Platform in May 2007, they also made a promise to allow application developers to monetize their applications however they like and keep 100% of the revenue. This market green-field led to the birth of a new niche of ad networks dedicated to serving the inventory created by Facebook Platform applications.

16. Facebook Platform Application Sponsorships

Advertisers looking for more integrated opportunities inside Facebook applications can consider approaching application developers and negotiating a sponsorship directly. For example, beverage companies have sponsored “drink-sharing” applications, while contact lens companies have sponsored “winking” applications.

17. Sponsored Facebook Groups

Before Facebook Pages launched, the only option available to advertisers wanting to establish a certified presence on Facebook was through the Sponsored Group program. Sponsored Groups are Facebook Groups with the ability to customize the HTML of certain regions on the page.

Report Credit:

Amal Jafri, Assistant Brand Manager – Flora

Unilever Pakistan

You can read Part 3 here