Facebook’s new social ads offering is one of a raft of new features introduced recently by the social networking site to justify their recent 15 billion dollar valuation.
While opinion on the services is mixed, I think there’s a real opportunity for search marketers to take control of this emerging advertising platform.
As you may have guessed from the recent plethora of SMX related blog posts, myself and Eloi recently attended the inaugural London Search Marketing Expo.While there I had the pleasure to presenting on the same panel as Cam Balzer.
Don’t worry Ad Agencies We’re Only Borrowing your clients – via flickr
He delivered a great presentation on social media advertising and really got me thinking about whether there is an emerging market for social media advertising management and whether PPC marketing experts are the right people for the job.
I could see plenty of reasons why
Keyword based – Social ads are triggered by keywords featured in peoples’ profile, there aren’t many organisations who understand keywords better than PPC companies. There’s going to be difference in the user intent but social ads aren’t a world apart from the Google content network.
Short Form text Ads – While it is possible to include images in social ads (and I imagine rich formats aren’t far away either) from a few quick experiments we’ve tried in-house text based adverts seem to work well. And when it comes to writing compelling short text based ads I know which kind of organisations are going to have the right pedigree.
All about ROI – Facebook have been pretty good thus far sharing the stats of your advertisements while their system is no where near the complexity of platforms like Adwords and Panama it does allow for some basic ROI monitoring.
While advertising companies who specialise in CPM adverts are getting better with their reporting transparency they still have a long way to go to catch up with PPC management companies
Integrated with other social media campaigns – personally I don’t have a lot to do with our PPC campaigns at SV, that’s more Eloi’s territory, but I can certainly see benefits of your social media marketing and advertising campaigns working together closely. Both will have similar goals and it makes sense for them to work in tandem.
Social Ads are an interesting development in the world of social media and it’ll be interesting to see who ends up managing them, Ad agencies of paid search agencies. But I think I’ve nailed my colours to the mast pretty clearly.
Related posts:
- SEO’s Guide to FaceBook Advertising | Part I: Facebook Flyers
- Thinking about advertising on Social Networks?
- Social Media Marketing Strategies for Recruiters White Paper
- Why Facebook Ads are a Better Opportunity Now than Adwords in 2000
- More Search Engine Marketing & Social Media White Papers than you can shake a stick at.
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