“Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “That is what people do all day on Facebook. We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.”
Facebook hired Nielsen Co. to conduct a study. They found out the following; sales boost by 68% when a “pop-up” ad is “liked” by one of their friends on their facebook page. It enhances the recall of the ad by 68% and doubles awareness of a brand’s message.
Currently Facebook sits at 500 million users and is generating more than $1 billion this year in revenues and has opened five international sales offices.
Brands are now starting to pay more attention to how to maximize Facebook and are slowly moving away from the free advertising tools to using what they call ‘social content\ adverts.” Which in simple terms is full on advertising, combined with the free tools.
For example Ford used the site’s free options, such as creating fan pages, to build up groups of fans who would share pictures and stories about their cars over the site.
Now Ford is in talks to buy social ads to promote the launch of the new 2011 Ford Explorer, which will be unveiled on Facebook later this month – they are willing to spend up to $100,000 on such homepage ads!
Most of our SA brands see FB as an effective SM platform to generate some buzz and build some communities, but now we need start viewing it as an alternative to traditional media – even TV/ Print.
I asked the Commercial Channel Manager at Habari Media, if this was activated in South Africa and this is his response:
“Yes the engagement ads featuring social context is available in South Africa and we have been offering this for a few months now.
According to Nielsen’s new product called Brandlift™ a user has a massive increase in purchase intent, ad recall and brand awareness based on seeing ads with social content and organic feeds. It is a fascinating study and proves that recommendations plays a massive role in purchases.”
Take a look at this article to gain a better understanding:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/nielsenfacebook-ad-report/
