Facebook II

I recently had the pleasure of having an insight to facebook that was provided by an actual insider!

It was a great session but very short. I had so many questions in relation to how get the most out of facebook which remained unanswered so I guess I just need to continue my experimentation on facebook.

Overall the discussion were mainly about what facebook is about and what their plans are. As can be expected, there were also many questions about privacy issues etc. Nonetheless, we didn't discuss the issue of facebook ban in China and whether facebook expects any changes in this market.

What I got out of the session...

What I did eventually get an answer for at the end of the class was how their 'bidding' advertising works? You basically decide your own price and the chance for your add to appear based on that price, depends on the amount of other bidders with similar add! This is something I will experiment with and I will write about the result in due course.

An interesting notion about advertising opportunities on facebook was their interactive adds which are the most successful on their site. In fact, these are often shared with friends if the advertiser can satisfy the targeted customer.

While these are not bidding adds and a quotation would be necessary to obtain the price, it is an amazing way to communicate a message without being intrusive. Something that companies should really be careful with if they want to advertise successfully.

But how do they customize the adds on each person's profile?

Do they use analytical tools on profile behavior? When you click on different profiles, you can see that the advertisements differ according to the interest of the particular profile. I have seen this change on my own profile. For a while I was searching for pages related to IT and at the same time, the advertising on my profile was mainly IT related.

Equally, when I joined sited related to nutrition, calorie count etc, I kept receiving advertising which related to diet.

Other opportunities are games, quizzes and different applications. For example a health/fitness company could post quizzes where vitamins/calories could be guessed. Also applications such as calorie counts and tracks. There are many other games, applications and quizzes I could think of which could increase the traffic to a given page. Another option would be to use these tools to direct the traffic to the actual website.