Facebook now offers advertising on keywords

Facebook now offers its advertisers the possibility to target their ads on members, using keywords from their public profiles, reports Clickz. This news comes after Facebook announced to make all its basic user profiles publicly available for non-members. It seems to us at 77 that both moves are pointed towards the same goal, that is to make targeted marketing a lot easier to their advertisers.

For marketers, it is crucial that Facebook has made user profiles available to them. We suspect that this construction allows advertisers to search for, and categorize users based on keywords. It would make the lives of marketers a lot easier if they could have their ads viewed by everyone who has listed, let’s say, ‘playing poker’ as a hobby. This kind of targeting could be a major step for Facebook in monetizing its popularity. Behaviorally targeted advertising is, according to recent research (reports WebProNews), more effective than contextual advertising. This apart form the fact that contextually targeted marketing is already pretty difficult in a social network.

Facebook will run ads anyway, as they have been doing for a long time. Its users can only benefit from targeted advertising so it seems to us, that this is a good development for both users and advertisers. Facebook is becoming the Google of social networking.

Of course, people are worried about privacy issues. On this subject, the Times Online wrote a critical and interesting article about Facebook and MySpace’s privacy statutes. The article also points out that only two in ten users have not allowed Facebook to publish their profiles. The editor of the article questions whether the other 80 percent knows about the things Facebook can do with the information. It might be possible that a large part of its users do not know that they have options regarding their personal info, but in that case they obviously don’t care much about it. In short, we do not see any problems with this issue when it comes to marketing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 1:42 am and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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