Facebook rolls out Social Ads

Reach over 50 million active users with an interactive and viral Facebook presence. That’s what Facebook is promising advertisers to get its money-wagon going.

Fifty million online users is a massive number to market to and Facebook found some creative ways to blend its social ads to their system. Here’s what its offering to advertisers:

• Social Ads – adverts targeted at Facebook members using their profile data. In a sense, the ads shown to users are directly related to the information of a member. Say, I bought a Nintendo Wii and updated my Facebook. It will say, “Yuga just bought a Wii and loves it. Btw, here’s a link to a Wii store.”
• Beacon: ad widgets that advertisers can put on their own sites that allow Facebook members to become product endorsers, and spread that endorsement to all of their friends on Facebook through their personal feeds. We all know that people trust their friends more now when it comes to product recommendations.
• Insight: Aggregated profile information that is exposed to Facebook advertisers that tells them what kind of people are getting their ads and who is clicking on them.

Facebook promises advanced targeting by age, gender, location plus many more demographics as well as allow advertisers to buy clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM). There’s also the ability to attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.

In short, Facebook will try and make the ad virtually part of the social page and not an intrusive content. It’s more like behavioral targeting rather than contextual targeting so you get more relevant results. And since privacy is a concern around ads, Facebook guarantees that advertisers never have access to who is seeing their ads, personal information about you, or even what social actions accompany their ads.

The success of this model still remains to be seen but it sure looks like a sound approach.