Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

Facebook announced the launch of its new and highly anticipated social ads platform on Nov. 5th, the new ad platform promises to offer new ways for businesses to interact with their audience, their official launch press release said: “an ad system for businesses to connect with users and target advertising to the exact audiences they want”.

So whats new in this platform? facebook broke down their offerings into 3 main parts which are:

1- Social Ads, which as far as I can see it doesn’t include anything new in terms of advertising offerings, it includes Facebook flyer’s and the sponsored news feeds part, all are advertising offers available prior to the launch of social ads. Targeting and reporting of the ads might have something new but its not apparent from those pages.

2- Business Pages, new offering as far as I can tell, it basically allows advertisers to creare their own pages on facebook, totally branded for them, the cool thing about these pages is that it allows advertisers to interact directly with their customers and fans, get direct feedback from them etc. however lots of companies have already been doing this on Myspace for example by creating a profile and customize it for their brand, whether Facebook has a new way to push users “naturally” to the advertiser’s page and encourage interaction is something we’ll have to wait and see, btw its free to create a business page, Facebook recommends that you use their social ads (news feed advertising) to promote your business page.

3- Facebook Beacon, now this is something totally new, with Facebook beacon you basically add a couple of lines of code to your website after determining which action on your website you want promoted, which include making an order, registering on the site etc. after doing so activities made by a Facebook member in your site will appear in his/her news feeds, which in turn promotes your business in a natural viral way. This is definitely going to be something interesting to watch and try!

Thats it in terms of advertising offerings, the platform however also includes Facebook Insights, which is a metrics interface for your Ad campaigns.

Myspace is also set to launch a new targeted Ad platform which as far as we can tell is going to be based on a CPC model, allows targeting of ads based on demographic, geographic and user interest categories and will have a minimum spend of $10.

[tags]Social ads, Facebook Ad platform, Myspace Ad platform[/tags]