Barb Wired

I was giving a seminar at WPI as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week when one of the attendees asked about the value of advertising on Facebook. Since this was the third time in one week this question was posed to me, I had some thoughts lined up. However, since my experience is limited (personally and anecdotal), I thought I’d ask a wider audience: are the ads you receive on Facebook just a new form of SPAM?

Some points that have come out of the conversations are listed below. Submit yours as a “PRO” or “CON”.

PROS

1. You can target your ads by profile fairly easily. That includes geography, age, gender, education level and other profile info provided to FB when you registered.
2. Ads are fairly inexpensive: great for startups and small businesses.
3. You only pay for what is served up.
4. FB asks for usefulness of ads it serves to individuals
5. There are a heck of a lot of people on FB
6. It’s fairly easy to create a following.
7. There are tools to help find conversations on FB, Twitter, etc. These can provide insight to your industry/ profession for free.

CONS

1. Since ads are fairly inexpensive, the barrier is low as is the screening. Are the companies real and above board?
2. Most folks don’t click on the ads.
3. The definition of ‘Friend’ is very broad so are you really reaching people that care/ are of the demographic you intended?
4. How meaningful is a link sent by a Friend you hardly know? Does it add to a company’s brand/ credibility?
5. Clicking often downloads an application… virus fears.

Barb Finer

barbwiredblog.blogger.com

blog.quivivity.com

www.quivivity.com

Just like banner ads and Google search rankings, social media needs to be monetizable (in the grand sense of measurable) to be taken more seriously by many businesses.

How does one measure the efforts of companies that are active in the Social Media space?

For example, the company has employees who visit a variety of blogs with answers to questions in their areas of expertise. How can these be tracked? How do we know how many people even read each post? Needs some sort of automation, I’d think.

I worked for NetGenesis at one time. We had tools that tracked visits to a company’s site in great detail….