I honestly at this moment do not believe in easy moneymaking on Facebook’s social ad platform. Their new released ad-regulations are outrageous. Even though they seem to have increased the number of ad blocks displaying on sites like your own profile page, I don’t hear about the CTR going up.
I mean, this is a no-brainer. While at MySpace your target crowd is between 12 and 20 years olds internet noobs with too much time on their hands, Facebooks target audience is much more technical-savy and older. Therefore, they may have more money in their pockets but will need much more conviction to click on your ad and then pick out their credit card.
Now this Valleywag article is stating that Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, thinks they could make more money by bringing back a more sophisticated version of the so hated Beacon. Obviously Facebook needs more squeeze out more money if it wants to get profitable and satisfy analyst expectations. You can expect Kendall to be under some pressure at this moment.
Example: You buy a ticket to a concert. After that, all your friends will be notified of your purchase if you want to.
The goal is to achieve a better viral distribution of the product or event. They are planning in rolling out the new Beacon in about 6 or 12 months. I’m not expecting them to name it “Beacon” again, just too much negative media buzz on that name already. I always thought it was only a matter of time before they start again with this Beacon stuff. The main difference now is that marketers will have to pay facebook to get named and the user itself will have to opt-in to get that message displayed on his news feed.
I guess if they turn this into an opt-in feature, lets just hope that users are also going to be rewarded for sales that will be reffered by their Beacon message incentivizing them to promote the product or event.
Facebook has a great batch of data for each user in its datacenter. That data is worth pure gold to Facebook and marketers, but if Facebook decides to keep their ad guidelines the way they are now I see people giving up on submitting 50 ads a day and getting 1 of them approved which will perform like sh**.
