SearchInfluence

As Facebook has become a more robust advertising platform, a broad smattering of ad units have shown up all over the platform. Almost every kind of content can be advertised on Facebook, from a text status to a Facebook app to a web site, leading to increased interaction and ultimately stronger organic performance of the content. It’s important to keep in mind the same things that drives high organic action rates: the importance of EdgeRank, the necessity of AWESOME, and the value of truly social campaigns.

Marketplace Ads

What will Facebook report on in the Ad Interface?

The Promoted Post
Writing this blog post: $8.09

Medium-size bag of Lay’s Chicken & Waffles chips: $1.09

Sponsoring this post on Facebook: $7.00

Being funny and popular on Facebook: Priceless

Why Should You Care?
Well besides the fact that Lay’s is pushing three atrocious new flavors on consumers, this was an exercise in “eating your own dog food.”

Ever wake up to a whole new world?

Many, including big brands, are convinced that Facebook Ads are a waste of money. Under their assumptions, even high rates of fan interaction don’t correlate to new business. However, it’s clear that promoting strong organic posts beyond the natural reach of a page drives the expected post interaction and page likes, while delivering real, money-making conversions.

By focusing on the psychographics, i.e. interest groups, who might be interested in each individual post, a marketer not only saves time and energy by merging organic and paid advertising campaigns, but also leverages the better position and higher click-through rate of Sponsored Stories to expand the business’s reach among its target groups.

Facebook announced a new look to their News Feed yesterday, which aims to streamline its appearance and cut down on irrelevant stories. In fact, the tagline on their announcement reads “Goodbye Clutter… Hello bright, beautiful stories.” The new version will focus on images, and they will appear much larger and richer than they had previously. To many reviewers, the updated feed looks like a cross between Google+ and the Facebook Mobile app. For the first time, the platform will look virtually the same across different devices. This leaves just one big question for both Facebook users and brands… Where will the ads go?

On Friday, I received an email from Facebook regarding their Page Insights. My initial reactions were “Great! They’ve finally realized how horrible their reporting system is and are making changes!” Boy, was I wrong. The email in its entirety is below, but the man gist is that they have been incorrectly reporting on the number of total, organic, and paid impressions and reach as reported through their Page Insights. Supposedly, the Ad Insights and Billing Data reporting tools are not affected, not that those are great anyway.

They promise that these issues will be fixed by today and “moving forward, your impressions and reach numbers in Page Insights will reflect these updates.”

Super Bowl advertising spots are one of the most sought after 30 seconds in television each year. With the event having an estimated viewership of well over 110 million, many national companies view the hefty $4 million dollar price tag as money well spent. In fact, the New York Times reported that the ad spots were already sold out on January 8th, almost a full month before the big event. In recent years many companies have amped up their traditional television campaigns to include YouTube sneak peeks, dedicated websites, hashtags, Facebook campaigns, and apps designed to garner appeal and catch their audience’s attention on the second screen. Social media is a growing factor in many major corporation’s 2013 Super Bowl advertising campaigns, which is a huge change from the surprise element and secretive campaigns of years past.

In a special edition of 5 for Friday, we’ve compiled the best articles about Facebook’s new Graph Search, which was released for beta testing on January 15!

Facebook Graph Beta Offers Multidimensional Social Search, New Networking Capabilities — Search Influence

Facebook’s Graph search introduces a new multi-dimensional tool for discovering people, places and things filtered by your personal friends and likes. The concept isn’t entirely new — Bing has been integrating social data into its results for over a year now now, and the Google Hotpot experiment (failed though it was) featured location- and personal recommendation-based place discovery, as well as a host of Foursquaresque features such as check-ins and reviews. However, Graph offers social search on an unprecedented scale, with access to likes, posts and preferences of users’ entire social network.

While some may view the right-hand side of their Facebook stalking experience as an uninteresting blob of text, Facebook was once the world’s largest display advertising network, pulling in over $2.2 billion in annual revenues. Even now, Facebook ads are an invaluable tool for any social media campaign. Industry standard click-through rates, the percentage of the time an impression leads to a user clicking on an ad, hover around .05%, but we’ve recently seen CTRs as high as 1.5% for well-targeted sponsored stories and over 7% for post like ads!
 
 

But this glowing opportunity can be hard to grasp if you work in less family-friendly fields. The reader can easily imagine business models that may be be considered prima facie inconsistent “with the overall user exp ...