By Charlene Li
I was preparing for my Graphing Social Patterns speech on Facebook marketing last night and decided to try out Facebook Flyers, which allows members to create their own little display ads that shows up in the left navigation bar. You can see the ad to the left, and in the ad is a request that people let me know if they saw the ad.
I bought the minimum, 2,500 flyers to run in one day for $5.00 with no targeting at all.
Just now, I received a flood of emails in my Inbox -- at first, I thought I was being spammed until I realized they were all responses to my ad!! The ad ran at 3:26pm PST and I received 67 responses over the course of two minutes. That's a 2.68% response rate. My first responder came from someone in Jordan, the last from a transplanted Nigerian in London. And yes, I'm going to be responding to each and every one of those 67 kind folks who bothered to click on my ad to thank them for their participation.
So this is just one small test that I thought I'd share about advertising on social networking sites. The vast, vast majority of ads that are "run of site" are the typical media buy that you see on many media sites - untargeted, undifferentiated. If you're going to market on social networks like Facebook, then you need to understand that this is a community where communication is paramount. Impersonal ads that shout and don't listen won't work.
If you've had experiences with Facebook Flyers, please share them in the comments below, or email me.
(Also, my presentation from the Graphing Social Patterns conference, "Big Brands & Facebook: Case Studies and Best Practices" is available online at SlideShare.)
Update: Didn't realize it, but I also got two pokes. That ups the response rate to 2.76%.
Tags: Facebook, online advertising, charleneli, Forrester Research, Groundswell
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