By Eric Savitz
Facebook today unveiled its advertising strategy. For some weird reason there’s a lot less buzz in the blogosphere about this than you’d think; but this seems to me to be a crucial step in the company’s ability to eventually grow into its $15 billion valuation and go public.
At an event in New York, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company’s Facebook Ads system offers “a completely new way of advertising online.” In its release, the company said the strategy has three parts:
- A way for businesses to build their own Facebook pages.
- An ad system “that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads.”
- An interface “to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.”
Here is a release with a list of some of the initial companies that plan to use the service.
The company says that more than 100,000 new Facebook pages launched today for large brands, local businesses, organizations and bands. Business can add all the usual Facebook doodads to their pages: photos, videos, music and applications.
Facebook says ad messages will gain distribution through “the social graph,” the network of connections people have in real life, as reflected on the site. “When people engage with a business’ Facebook page, that action will spread information about that business through the social graph,” the company says. I presume what that means in part is, if I “friend,” oh, I dunno, Bob’s Mortuary, then the news feed for all my friends pages will say, “Eric is now friends with Bob’s Mortuary.” And so Bob gets some publicity. I’m oversimplifying, but I think that is the general idea. And when something changes on the Bob’s Mortuary page – Bob’s has added a new photo! – I’ll get a message in my own news feed.
The company is offering something called Facebook Insights, with metrics about activity and ad performance, free to all Facebook Pages and Social Ads.
Another aspect of the strategy is called Facebook Beacon, which let’s you pull information from other sites for display on your Facebook page. This could include things like listings from eBay (EBAY), movie information from Fandango.com or travel information from Travelocity. The company said 44 sites so far have committed to make information available via Facebook Beacon.
All of this is supposed to launch tonight, according to the very useful live blogging of the event by TechCrunch. It is going to be very interesting to see how this all plays out; how quickly the ads catch on; and whether there is any user backlash to seeing commercial messages crop up the Facebook news feeds. Stay tuned.