“Social Ads”: What is he thinking?

The first line in an article on today’s NYT reads: “Facebook wants to turn every member into a spokesman for its advertisers.” Facebook’s does this through the birth of “social ads.”

There seems to be two elements to these new “social ads.”

First: Advertisers will be able to create profiles.

Second: News feeds will expand the information covered to include your “love” or support for a brand or product.

First thing that ran through my mind was “I hope he is making huge amounts of money because people will not like this.” But then I kept reading.

It seems that revenue won’t actually originate from the actual news feed. Which I think would be the interesting concept.

It would create revenue the same way clicking on an ad currently does. Every time someone recommends a product or company this recommendation would be considered the equivalent of a click. Well whatever… that’s not the way it works.

“Social ads” revenue will come from charging advertisers for the right to append a message or a photo to the news feed.

If this was the only announcement Facebook made I would have made a comment on how annoying Facebook was getting and let it go. Eventually people would have gotten tired of advertising for free.

No matter how devoted a person is to a brand I can’t see them going out of their way to advertise it more than a couple of times. Once people got bored the bombardment of ads would stop.

So as I was saying, there was a second announcement. This announcement is one I have been waiting for some time and I’m still surprised it took this long.

Facebook will now allow advertisers to target potential customers using their profiles. I think this is genius, a little creepy, but genius. And unlike the news feed advertisement the Facebook community won’t have any control over it.

The problem arises not from Facebook’s want to make some extra cash, or from advertisers targeting certain customers (after all isn’t this the fantasy of all advertisers) but from the fact that everything on Facebook seems to happen in waves.

So when Mark Zuckerberg states that “nothing influences a person more than the recommendation of a trusted friend” I will agree but will also add that when a person’s trusted friend starts feeling targeted and leaves Facebook, many other’s will also follow their recommendation.