Facebook Fixes Social Advertising Problems

At one time, Myspace was the biggest kid on the social network block, but Facebook has defeated it, partly by improving its strategy of social advertising, or the lack of it.

Much discussion surrounding Facebook centers on how it shapes the social interactions of users, so it's sometimes overlooked that the company has profoundly rewritten the online advertising rules. When someone mentions the revenue of Facebook, it's generally in the aggregate: Facebook will bring in nearly two billion dollars this year, and almost twice that amount in 2011.

Most of the revenue of Facebook comes from the selling of ads on the social network platform. This was seen as a barren soil area for revenues from ads until about one year ago. Facebook has made social ads pay off for them through various tricks. One of the top-performing innovations was reaching out to smaller advertisers, offering self-serve ads on the giant social networking site.

If you want to set up an ad on Facebook, it's actually easier than using the better-known Google AdWords. Recently, a freelance writer wanted to test the concept, and set up a page for his work - not an elegant ad, but then it only took two minutes. Within five more minutes, the writer had created a targeted ad, pointed at his target demographic, which was males in their 40's, college grads who live in the San Francisco area and who are interested in technology or business journalism.

Facebook was able to instantly narrow the target audience to 4220 users who would likely see the ad, and it recommended that the writer bid between 30 and 45 cents for each impression. It wasn't meant to be a successful ad since it was only a test, but it did prove than in ten minutes or less, any business can become an advertiser on Facebook.

Facebook also hosts basic tutorials that will help its advertisers to design ads that are more effective. Once the ads are live, the advertisers can receive custom data on the ad's performance, in a format that is simple and that encourages advertisers to use various kinds of ads. Tweaking the demographics or location of users may sometimes be successful, as may using different images, text and keywords. Facebook makes it easier than does Google, to place ads and tweak them to be the most effective.

In addition, Facebook benefits from your advertising experimentation. They don't charge you for the pertinent data, but the experiments on its advertisers gives Facebook valuable insight into what will make people click on ads within its site.