How Will Video Ads Affect Facebook?

With video ads on the horizon, we can only wonder if this will be the end of Facebook. They have slowly rolled out additional ad products in attempt to monetize their free service. Mark Zuckerberg, Chairman and CEO, also expressed their eagerness to venture further into mobile during a recent earnings call:

“…comScore put out a report saying that Facebook is now 23% of all time spent on apps in the U.S., and one of the next biggest apps is Instagram at 3%. So, put together, we’re now more than a quarter of the time spent in apps. Today, there’s no argument. Facebook is a mobile company. As I’ve said before, there are three main parts of our strategy; build the best mobile products, build the platform and services that leverage the social graph, and build a really strong monetization effort engine.”

What does this all mean? In Facebook’s eyes, mobile is an untapped revenue opportunity. Now, monetization efforts will no longer focus solely on desktop ads.

With the advent of the “new” News Feed, the emphasis is clearly on visual content. According to Ad Age, the video ad product will be targeted to users’ News Feeds on desktop and mobile devices. The ads are expected to be capped at 15 seconds and will autoplay.

Are marketers excited? Absolutely. This opens up a whole world of opportunity for advertising to Facebook users. Are Facebook users excited? This one is up for discussion. Facebook has to be wary of introducing another new ad product for fears that it might be viewed as intrusive.

How do you feel Facebook users will respond to video ads?

Like this post? Connect with Erika Barbosa on Google+.

Image credit: birgerking

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents: Top Tips For Facebook Advertising

Ten Golden Rules founder and CEO Jay Berkowitz offers his experienced knowledge on Facebook advertising and how you can really pinpoint your marketing strategies to best benefit your business. If you've been struggling with the Facebook and your business, this webinar is perfect for you!

This webinar will include:

• facebook ad design
• targeting tactics
• measurement and tracking
• ninja tricks

and much more! 

Click here to register for FREE (11/7/12 at 12:30PM EST)
http://bit.ly/IMCreg

About Jay Berkowitz:

Jay Berkowitz is an author, an educator, an International keynote speaker and an award-winning thought leader. A senior online marketing professional with over twenty years of marketing experience, Mr. Berkowitz has managed marketing departments for Fortune 500 brands: Coca-Cola, Sprint and McDonald's Restaurants, and he has developed online and offline strategies for AT&T and leading health and fitness website eDiets.com.

Mr. Berkowitz is the author of The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing Workbook, the Founder and CEO of www.TenGoldenRules.com, a strategic online marketing consulting business based in Boca Raton, Florida. He is the host of the Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Podcast, an Adjunct Professor with the University of San Francisco Internet Marketing Course and he has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, The Business Journals and he was interviewed on FOX Business TV.


Click here to register for FREE (11/7/12 at 12:30PM EST)
http://bit.ly/IMCreg

Facebook PPC Ads that Kill

Facebook’s pay-per-click (PPC) is still considered fairly new. Nonetheless, we’ve been playing in it long enough to put together some best practices for marketing on Facebook. These tips will help you get an edge over the competition in Facebook’s advertising platform:

1. A picture is worth a thousand words – Although Facebook ads allow for a small image, it is very easy to blend in with all the visual stimulation happening on a person’s page. We recommend using bold, bright colors to help your ad stand out. Red or orange is good – stay away from blue or white, which are Facebook’s colors and acts like camouflage.  You can also add a bright border to your image to make it pop out from the screen. Always keep the image (and the ad itself) to a singular focus. Trying to fit too much into one ad will definitely limit your ROI; besides, you can simply create another ad with different information. 
2. Get to the point – As any marketing professional knows, your ad copy should be geared toward your target audience. Since these ads are so brief, focus on benefits and include a call to action – the stronger, the better! We’ve also found that mentioning the company name works quite well. Remember, you only have 90 characters for body copy, but sometimes less is more so try writing only 40-70 characters and test your ads.
3. Hit a bulls eye – Targeting your ads is obviously important, but this feature is continuously changing on Facebook, so we suggest you learn about all the different targeting options and stay up-to-date (hint: we often post updates on this blog.) We also recommend that you turn on the “show social activity” feature, even if your ad goes to an external link. We call this “passive word of mouth” and you can see how it shows up in the example below. 

 Do you have any other tips for creating a successful advertising campaign on Facebook? Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

Facebook Tests Even More Intrusive Ads

Facebook has announced that it is starting a very small test for promoted news feed posts. These ads will allow brands to advertise to “non-fans” in their news feed. This may apply to both the desktop and mobile.

The ads will be elegantly masked as typical page post ads with a small “sponsored” label in the bottom right corner. The recipient of the ad will also have the option to “like” the brand’s Facebook page directly from the ad.

Mashable provides the following example of what the news feed ads will look like:

As an advertiser, this could be an awesome advantage for your brand to reach a larger audience. You will no longer be limited to advertising to just your fans, but your entire target market in Facebook.

For the user, it’s a completely different story. This could be even more intrusive than all of the ads you are currently bombarded with. It will just be another addition to the already cluttered news feed.

But, we must keep in mind that Facebook is a free service and at the end of the day, it’s still a business.

Tell us your initial thoughts about news feed ads in the comments below.

Like this post? Connect with Erika Barbosa on Google+.

Image credit: Horia Varlan

83 Million Facebook Profiles Not Real

Facebook recently admitted that more than 8.7% of its 955 million Facebook accounts worldwide are fakes. That equals roughly 83 million profiles that are not real. Facebook broke the numbers down even further stating that the largest portion of the faux pie comes from 46 million duplicate accounts, or 4.8% of all accounts. Duplicate accounts are defined by Facebook as “an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account.”

The next biggest portion includes user-misclassified profiles, which are personal profiles that have been created for companies, instead of pages, or for a non-human entity, such as a pet. Yes, people have Facebook profiles for their pets. (Teaching the pet to maintain his own account would be a great trick)! These make up 2.4% or 23 million of the fake accounts. The remainder is made up of undesirable profiles, which are considered to be in breach of Facebook’s terms & conditions, and these number about 14 million.

The biggest issue here for Facebook is the effect this news will have on its advertisers and, subsequently, its stock price. It doesn’t help that earlier this month, software startup Limited Run claimed that 80% of the clicks on their Facebook ads were coming from bots. Tech Crunch did some of its own investigating and was skeptical about the timing of the announcement. Limited Run’s co-founder, Tom Mango, said the research was done earlier this year, but the company waited to post the results of their own testing until just after the launch of their new website. At any rate, Mango made it clear that they are not saying Facebook is behind the bots that are inflating the number of clicks – other factors, such as a vicious competitor could also be behind it.

Limited Run has certainly gotten Facebook’s attention and the social networking company says it’s investigating the claims. In the meantime, Facebook CFO David Ebersman said that Facebook is doing everything it can to ensure that Facebook is populated by real people. Does this change the way you use Facebook advertising? 

Image credit: davedehetre

Is Facebook becoming a prison for web traffic?

According to this insightful article by Anil Dash, Facebook is "openly attacking its users ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web." For instance, Facebook is removing the capability of syndicated content to be posted via Facebook Notes and forcing users to post notes individually. He also goes on to speak about how privilege is given to captive content on Facebook after only one approval from a given user (Yahoo! News is a good example) over outside links - that is, content like this will always be higher on the news feed. Facebook also creates an atmosphere of fear for users by deeming even websites that it has indexed to be unsafe, displaying warnings about outside websites and security.

What does all of this mean? It means that despite the fact that Facebook remains one of the greatest internet marketing tools that a business can utilize that it may also present barriers to the very users you are trying to attract to your website or landing page.

Tell us what you think in the comments section of this blog post.

Free Resources: New Facebook for Business Site

Today I’m stepping away from Google+ (although not for very long) to take a look at what Facebook for Business has been up to. Facebook recently released the Facebook for Business site which Mashable reports, “provides step-by-step guidance for how to best use Facebook’s marketing tools,” a Facebook company rep says.


Although the site is geared more for those starting out with their Facebook for Business strategy, the site does offer free resources that are worth a read even if just to brush up on best practices for Facebook Pages and Ads.

Below are a handful of resources I collected from the website:

Best Practices Guide: Marketing on Facebook

Building Your Business with Facebook Pages

Sponsored Stories for Premium and Marketplace

Did you find these resources or the website helpful?

We’ve Got New Facebook Ad Types

Facebook has done it again. They’re adding new features so fast it’s starting to become difficult to keep up. What is the latest and greatest from Facebook you ask? Get ready because the two new ad types they rolled out, simply put are - “bad ass”. Each time Facebook updates its advertising they make Google advertising look plain old boring and less effective.

When you log into Facebook advertising, right away you will notice a couple of changes. Now you have an option to choose the type of ad you want. Your choices are “Sponsored Stories” and “Facebook Ads”. The first option “Sponsored Stories” is new. “Facebook Ads”, the second option, is the original ad choice.

“Sponsored Stories” compared to your typical “Facebook Ads” will give you distribution for the News Feed stories published about your Page, Place or App, as well as fans who like your page. You can choose from two different types of Sponsored Stories.

The first type is called “Page Like Story”. When people Like your Page, their friends see a story about it. This is an effective tactic to promote fan building. The below highlight of the ad shows my friends that I Liked the page; there is nothing better than getting a recommendation from a friend.












The second type of ad is called “Page Post Story”. When you post an update to your Page, your fans see a story about it. This is a great way to advertise a new product or promotion. The average Facebook user has almost 200 friends and this does not even count all the pages they “Like”. If you are a brand posting a new advertisement on your wall, it’s very likely to be missed on your fans’ walls. There simply is too much information being posted on their walls.

For an example, I created a status update that reads, “This is a status update to show the new ad type,” to illustrate how it would appear on this type of ad. The only drawback is when you make the next status update it will change the ad as you cannot specify one status update to always be shown.










Have fun using the new ad types in your campaigns. Let me know how successful they are for you. I will be doing a follow-up post once I have some measurable data of how successful the campaigns are. In the meantime, hold on because I have a feeling Facebook will be releasing many new advertising features in the very near future.

Jump on the Social Coupon Band Wagon

First, we had Groupon, then came Living Social and now Facebook is jumping into the one-day deal social coupon business. According to an article on Bloomberg.com, Facebook is planning to test the coupon idea in order to increase ad revenues & engage local businesses. The test will launch in five select cities including Austin, Atlanta, San Francisco, San Diego & Dallas.

Facebook will employ it's own staff to sell the deals to local businesses and offer coupons via partners like ReachLocal, GiltCity, homerun.com and PopSugar City. The service will expand the Facebook Deals functionality that is already built into Places. It's still not clear if Facebook will employ a minimum number of purchasers before offering the deal yet. The current strategy according to Emily White, Facebook's Director of Local Operations, will be to focus on those offers that users are inclined to do with friends - dining, concerts and outdoor activities.

Maybe that part in the movie where Zuckerberg stole someone else's business idea isn't so far-fetched after all? Or maybe it's like everything else on the world wide web, find a business model that works and make it better. Who wouldn't want to find a way to get on the action in an industry that is expected to reach $3.73 billion by 2015?

Another Facebook Advertising Tip

Use CPM (cost per impression) to test your Facebook ads instead of CPC (cost per click). When testing your ads using CPC it diverts the focus from testing the actual ads to testing the landing page or pages. There will be plenty of time to test landing pages but right now we want to test which ads produce the lowest CPC.


Pay Per Click equals 1.08 USD per click


Pay Per Impressions equals 0.38 USD per thousand

Remember, using CPM to first test the ads, you can determine what the true CPC rate is based on the actual performance of the ads. Testing your ads this way requires a tad bit more effort but will pay back big time when you save some of your budget testing the ads.

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Targeting 500 Million of Your Best Prospects – Best Practices for Facebook Advertising

Join Margie Schneider, VP Operations of TenGoldenRules.com, as she presents, “Targeting 500 Million of Your Best Prospects – Best Practices for Facebook Advertising”. This webinar will review best practices for advertising in Facebook using enhanced filtering. Learn how you can leverage the unique advertisement features Facebook offers to reach your desired audience.

This presentation will explain the following topics:

• How to Successfully Set Up Facebook Campaigns
• Proven Methods for Using Facebook Filters
• Advanced Campaign Filtering Strategies
• Best Practices for Testing Ads
• Tactics for Gaining "Likes" and Reaching "Friends"
• Understanding Facebook FBML Landing Pages vs Website Landing Pages

This free webinar will take place Wednesday, August 18, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register and for more information please visit: Targeting 500 Million of Your Best Prospects – Best Practices for Facebook Advertising

Facebook Connection Targeting

Looking for a creative way to increase your conversion rate in your Facebook PPC campaigns? Here’s a quick tip on using the connections filter.

One of the three types of connections you can target is, “friends of people who are already fans”. As a result, the ad will show up with an endorsement from your friend, incredible right? You will not find a more powerful type of ad in Facebook’s arsenal. I’ve included an example of what the ad would look like below and yes I’m a fan of the Captain.

If you decide to try this type of ad let me know how your connection targeting goes.

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Ten Golden Rules of Facebook for Business – Part 2

Join Margie Schneider, VP Operations of TenGoldenRules.com, as she presents Part 2 of Ten Golden Rules of Facebook for Business.

Part 2 of this presentation will cover:

- Facebook Advertising (Laser Targeting, Test Images, Test Headlines)
- How to Use Facebook Insights (Best Practices, Analysis, Demographics)
- Promote in other marketing (Website, Blog, TV, eMail Signature, Events, Brochures, FB Connect)
- Viral Concepts (How to Reach Fans' Friends)
- S-Commerce (Social-Commerce: BestBuy, Dell, Jimmy Johns)

This free webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 31, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register and for more information please visit: Ten Golden Rules of Facebook for Business – Part 2