As I was working on the whitepaper I am writing about the four “value components” of social networking sites (SNS) last night, I came across a situation while perusing Facebook that I had to write about now rather than wait to discuss it in the paper. The topic is regarding the content that SNS play host to that serves as the “real estate” upon which marketers pay to place their advertisements on and around. As you will see from the two pictures below, one a screen shot of an ad for the Lincoln MKS on Facebook and the other a screen shot of a Google search results page for the Lincoln MKS, the “real estate” is quite different.
As you will see, I have edited out the lewd gesture in the screen shot from Facebook, however if you have any imagination at all you should be able to guess what the picture shows. While in most circumstances this certainly is not content that would have a place on our corporate blog, I decided to go ahead and post the picture for learning purposes to prove a point and because if you speak with anyone from my generation they will tell you this kind of content isn’t far off from being par for the course on Facebook. In fact, this was one of several pictures along the lines of this kind of content that I came across in the same visit I considered using for this post.
Now just about anyone can see why the real estate on the Google search page might be more desirable than the real estate on the Facebook page for Lincoln as an advertiser here. For one thing, when advertising on Google you aren’t trying to sell a four-door sedan with Weir leather trimmed seats and an EcoBoost V6 engine to someone who is trying to figure out why this girl hasn’t untagged herself from this photo yet, let alone posted it in the first place. On the Google page however, the real estate is all high quality search results with matching information to the advertisements.
I like to think of content as the mechanism by which web properties channel and drive certain user behaviors. For example, Amazon wouldn’t be great at selling books if the content on their site did not contain information about books, such as reviews, pricing, vendor information, reading recommendations, etc. So after seeing the Lincoln MKS ad, I decided to go through Facebook and mark down all the page types with ads that I could find. Below is my preliminary list, please add pages I may have forgotten in the comments.
- Profiles (Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes, and any other application tabs)
- Groups
- Pages
- Applications (Including Facebook’s core apps such as links and notes)
- Friend/People lists
- News Feed
- Search results pages
What I would be interested in seeing is the data on which page types have the highest click through rates on advertisements. My guess is the third party apps with specific information types driving a particular user behavior have the highest click throughs. Evidence of this could be the fact that Zynga, the second biggest advertiser on Facebook behind AT&T, spends approximately $2.5 million a month on Facebook advertising. Since users actively play Zynga games or other gaming apps while on Facebook, an ad for a new application would align with the content on those pages more directly than most other ads and pages found on Facebook. Again, I cannot say this for sure as this is simply a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess).
I believe moving forward allowing advertisers to have more control over what types of content their ads are paired with will be a good thing for social networking sites, specifically Facebook, in terms of developing better targeting for reaching users. What are your thoughts? What pages would you think are the best for reaching users through ads? Or do you think I am entirely off on this? Would love to hear your thoughts.
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