Yet the world of Facebook advertising is a potentially lucrative one, and while it began, like AdWords, as a service through which affiliates and partner services gained referrals, it graduated to one in which big brands paid top dollar to advertise. And it often makes no sense.
For example, when I last visited my Facebook profile, my sponsored advertisement was for a Coors Light-themed football sub-site, where I could apparently "Keep track of [my] stats" and "win prizes for [my] picking skills." I know nothing about football. Nothing about my Facebook profile mentions football, nor do I spend any time on the internet reading or writing about football. I clicked the X in the top-right corner of this advertisement, and was promptly asked why I removed it. I selected "Uninteresting." Refreshing the page served me the same ad, which I promptly continued to not click on after Facebook already knew that I had no interest in it.
This phenomenon is not unique to me. Facebook targets ads for online personals to users who specify that they are married (who may, but are significantly less likely to, be in the market for online dating), political smear ads to everyone (regardless of region), pet boutiques (to the petless), and jobs testing video games (to people whose profiles say nothing about video games). While the Facebook advertising system gathers some information via users' IP addresses, allowing ads to be geographically targeted, it often shoots and misfires completely, which doesn't lead to good business.
Mostly, however, Facebook advertises itself. More than anything else shows me advertisements for Facebook advertising as a service, with headlines about growing my business or about reaching prospective customers. Somehow this makes me even less certain that Facebook advertising works; I'm concerned with the fact that it appears to suffer from a dearth of advertising it can even consider viable to direct at me, leaving me instead with advertisements for it. As a medium, I can't help but wonder what good it could possibly do for me.
There's also the business of direct messages, which can be sent to almost any user from almost any page or user. While they do reach users, and often prompt notifications, they're essentially Facebook's equivalent to spam, and while it can be extremely useful to send messages to large groups of people, advertising for products and events -- especially events advertised to everyone in one's friend group, regardless of geographic region -- it is one of the easiest ways to frustrate and anger users. Overdoing it can easily lead to you being reported for abuse of the medium, or worst of all, getting defriended or losing Fans of your product or service.
While Facebook has proven hugely valuable and will at some point lead to innovations in the world of advertising, it still has a way to go.
Guest Blogger Andrew Hall: My Dog Ate My Blog & Guide to Online Schools