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]

Every Monday I’ll be posting the highest rated video for the week from my funny video clips website, this week’s selection is titled “Cool Job” and you can view the video below:

[tags]funny video, funny video clip[/tags]

Its an exciting weekend thats for sure, after lots of speculation about Google and Myspace’s counter attack to Facebook’s growth and the huge popularity of their apps platform, and after Google wasn’t able to outbid Microsoft for a piece of Facebook, whether they weren’t able to outbid Microsoft or they weren’t that interested because they had OpenSocial up their sleeves remains unknown.

So what is OpenSocial, basically its a gathering of social networks that allows 3rd party developers to get data from these social networks and write applications for them through the use of the common API’s that will be made available for them by OpenSocial.

Myspace is far the largest social network to join the OpenSocial platform, this means that they have neglected he option of building their own platform and opted to use Google’s, which is definitely a good idea since from the looks of it, Facebook and Microsoft are forming a team against Google and the others.

Other “2nd tier social networks” joined the OpenSocial platform including Ning, Linked In, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and others. Orkut officially announced the launch of their open platform on November 1st making it the 1st website to use and implement OpenSocial.

Techcrunch and the New York times were among the 1st websites o report the rumors about OpenSocial, which later was confirmed by Google, As Google described their new platform by saying, if Facebook is 98% open, OpenSocial will be 100% open.

Data privacy are amongst one of the issues about all of this openness, especially with the news about Facebook’s SocialAds and the targeting of ads based on profile data. Which you can bet your ass Google is planning to do something similar to with all of these networks joining OpenSocial.

Today’s question is, will Fcebook join OpenSocial? or will they take their own path and risk being viewed as an outsider, from the looks of it every other social network is joining OpenSocial, personally I don’t think Facebook will join OpenSocial simply because they already have their own, very successful platform, and there is no reason to join OpenSocial except for the reason mentioned earlier, for the sake of not being viewed as an outsider.

From a webmaster and an internet Entrepreneur’s view, the more social networks join OpenSocial and the more open their platforms are the happier I am, so far I missed the train with Facebook apps but I am planning to get on board, and with large social networks like Myspace opening, the opportunities of cashing out in their platforms are greater.

[tags]OpenSocial, Socialads, apps, open platform[/tags]

Some interesting articles I came across these past few days…

• Get a Pagerank victim badge, Blogoscoped
• Top 6 ideas for incredible viral content, Techipedia
• Matt Cutts confirms paid links, Searchenginejournal.com
• Facebook’s social ad network, Techcrunch
• On page SEO tips, SEObook
• Are reciprocal links dead? they are not with Performancing

6 links are enough this time, more in the next episode of speed linking!