Archive for the ‘Analysis’ Category
Will There Be Install Campaigns for Facebook Connect Apps?
Thursday, September 4th, 2008One of the most popular campaigns done through Facebook advertisers remains to be install campaigns. These are campaigns that drive users viewing the advertisements to other applications. Cost per install (CPI), became a term regularly used by advertisers in this space when the Facebook platform launched over a year ago. Facebook Connect is different though because the end result is that users are driven to an external website.
Does it Matter Where You Engage Your User?
When clients turned to “Facebook experts” last year and asked “Why should we add so many features within a Facebook application?” they regularly received the same response: “The more features you add, the better. It doesn’t matter where you are engaging your users as long as you are engaging with them.” The same argument still holds true for the most part but theoretically clients could finally get what they wanted in the first place: users driven to their website.
Sometimes you just need to give the client what they want. Over the past year I’ve heard countless companies request that they’d like to drive users to their website, not to a Facebook application. The biggest problem with running Facebook campaigns was that users were driven to a Facebook application but they never converted into website users. This could change with Connect.
Do Install Campaigns for Connect Apps Make Sense?
When users install a Facebook Connect application, they can be redirected to an external website. It can be as something simple as a commenting application, or something more complex that leverages the user’s data to produce a more custom experience. The purpose of using the Facebook platform has always been the same: access to valuable user data including the user’s relationships.
There is also the desire to have access to viral distribution channels. Facebook extends both of these capabilities to the web. While we haven’t seen the release of the first Facebook Connect applications, when Connect is released from beta later this year we could see a massive influx of new applications. As for those install campaigns of the past? My guess is that we could see more of them, except this time around the end result is going to be an external website, not Facebook.
Does This Help Facebook?
One has to wonder if Facebook will end up developing some sort of policy which says “All Facebook Connect application installations must originate from external sites.” The main issue is that increasing pageviews is one of the primary benefits of the Facebook platform but this isn’t accomplished through external install campaigns. Right now all we have is theory and speculation to go on but I could see this becoming a complex issue for Facebook.
Do you foresee external Facebook Connect application install campaigns in the future? What do you think are the biggest implications for Facebook?
Facebook Monetization Opportunity: Search
Saturday, August 30th, 2008This afternoon I got to thinking about various opportunities for businesses to leverage Facebook and realized that Facebook is not taking advantage of one of their greatest opportunities: search. A few months ago, Microsoft announced that they were going to begin offering Microsoft Live search results for Facebook as well as search ads. So far nothing has been implemented.
The most important search results on Facebook is people but many users are regularly search for specific products and services within Facebook yet those products and services are not the first results that are displayed. Most often you need to click on the “Pages” tab to find any of the brands or services. In the case that it’s a person, a fan page will regularly show up but this only appears to occur for people.
So how could Facebook help businesses leverage what’s currently an unrealized opportunity? Simple: sponsored results. If I search for “Ford” and was looking for Ford Motors and not my friend who’s last name was “Ford”, a sponsored ad will show up at the top of the search which directs me to the “Ford Motor Company” fan page. I’ve produced a sample image below of what this could look like.
Currently Facebook has the curse of extremely engaging pages. The site is so engaging that most people don’t even realize that there are ads on the side of most pages. The one place where I’d suggest that this trend breaks is when people search for things. At this point there is an amazing opportunity to grab the user’s attention.
How many people are searching for Ford on a regular basis? I don’t know but enough people are writing about it that it shows up in the Facebook Lexicon, which tracks the frequency of words on walls. If people are writing about it, then it’s probably pretty good assumption that they are writing about it. While Facebook doesn’t currently monetize their search, this is a quick way for the company to boost their revenues while they keep searching for a breakthrough advertising solution.
Facebook Needs Some Work on Ad Relevance
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
This evening I was browsing Facebook and stumbled upon the following ad that I’ve pictured on the left. The ad displays one of my friends and a book advertisement suggesting that somehow the two things are correlated. The only problem? They aren’t! If you take a look at my friend Krista’s profile, there is nothing that would suggest that she read the book unless the system somehow knew that she was active in social media and may have read the book “The rise of conversation”.
She didn’t explicitly state that she had read the book though. The other part which is confusing is that next to her it says that she recently “joined the group Jaffe Juice.” How is that relevant to the advertisement whatsoever? I understand that I may want to know what my friend is up to but when placing that information within an advertisement it doesn’t make much sense.
Facebook is in the process of improving their advertisement solutions but when it comes to Social Ads, it appears that they are still having some trouble. Just last week we wrote about Facebook’s Engagement Ads and how they could help advertisers. It makes sense that Facebook would release advertising solutions they can immediately sell but they should also be investing heavily in improving ad relevance.
I have to be honest, the advertisements on Facebook have been improving but many of them still aren’t relevant at all. I’m not sure if this is because big brands aren’t investing in Social Ads or if it’s because Facebook isn’t serving them properly. I’m not qualified to comment on how the system determines ads unfortunately but I know the one that they displayed in the picture above doesn’t make much sense at all.
Update
Wow … as usual I wasn’t the most observant person. Apparently the book that was displayed was by Joseph Jaffe. I confused the book “The Rise of Conversation” by Joseph Jaffe with the book “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. So apparently the ad wasn’t that bad after all!
Facebook Swears It’s A Tech Company, Not Media
Friday, August 22nd, 2008Over the past few days I’ve been writing about the shift of social networks from technology companies to media companies at the Social Times. If you haven’t been paying attention, you might want to check out a post on Techcrunch today in which Mike Arrington argues that Facebook’s lack of a centrally controlled music service is damaging its domestic growth.
Last year I suggested that Facebook is supposed to be launching a music service after a source told me that he had spoken with somebody that interviewed for a position to run a music service. Mike Arrington says that it’s now clear that Facebook is sticking with iLike as its music partner. That was emphasized when iLike was announced as a launching member of Facebook’s Great Apps program.
Hadi discussed this during an interview with the Social Times. For Facebook to launch their own competing music service would be a bad political move but as Mike Arrington suggests, “Music is such a big category that is so completely dominated by MySpace, that it seems like they should have their overall music strategy under their direct control.”
So is music key to Facebook’s domestic growth? It’s clear that music is definitely one way to attract outside visitors. Millions of bands and artists use MySpace as their central location for promoting their work and that means millions of visitors being promoted to the site. Is there another channel that Facebook can target that has the same level of self-promoting activities?
Not that I know of. Is there any other group that you think Facebook should be targeting?
Can Facebook Give Users Total Control?
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008One of the primary issues facing consumers in the digital era is control of their private data. Yesterday I wrote about the Peter Jennings special “No Place to Hide” which covered a lot of the issues facing consumers. The reality is that munch of our transactional data is already tracked and used to create custom profiles of our identities. Online there is currently no way to manage that data and all one can rationally conclude is that somewhere along the line our data is being sold.
Will Facebook’s International Competitors Slow Its Growth?
Monday, August 4th, 2008As Facebook’s growth domestically has slowed, Facebook has looked abroad for continued growth opportunities. So far Facebook has been experiencing some phenomenal growth, especially in Latin America. Unfortunately though, the spectacular growth that Facebook is looking for in other countries is not coming easily. An Associated Press article this morning highlights many of the challenges that the company faces, specifically in Russia.
Not that the competition wasn’t unexpected but brand loyalty to many of these sites appear to be significant. Just last week I was walking through the Apple store in Bethesda, Maryland when I saw one of the customers browsing Vkontakte, a Russian Facebook copycat. In an article on Techcrunch yesterday, Serkan Toto highlighted why Facebook and MySpace are facing an uphill battle in Japan.
The article compares Facebook and MySpace to Mixi.jp, the current leading social network in Japan. Much of Serkan’s analysis is unfair though because if you zoom into Facebook’s growth in Japan, it is significant as the chart below illustrates.
In the past year alone, Facebook has more than doubled its presence in Japan and thanks to translating the site into Japanese, the company experienced an immediate jump in traffic only a few months ago. It’s clear though that Facebook’s international expansion won’t be an easy one as it attempts to battle the native social networks. If the hype surrounding Facebook is going to remain though, the company will need to continue posting significant growth numbers abroad, something that has already been slowing according to the most recent numbers from Comscore and Hitwise.
So what will Facebook do to continue their growth? Well, the first thing is to release more languages that are currently in the process of being translated. The second step is to continue to release innovative features that position the company above the competitors. Any other ideas on how Facebook can boost their growth?
How Does Facebook Target Ads Exactly?
Monday, July 28th, 2008
An interesting thing happened to me over the weekend when I was down in Miami this weekend. At some point during the weekend I logged into Facebook and noticed an ad for South Florida Rehab Homes. Prior to now, I always thought the Facebook ad targeting program used profile data to target users. For instance, if you try to create an ad through the Facebook Social Ads tool, you can target by location.
I always assumed that when you selected a city, state or country, the information was displayed via profile data. If you select Florida, the estimated number of users in that demographic is 1,348,540. According to the Social Ads help section, “Facebook determines the location of a user based on IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, which can help identify the country or city where a user is physically located. The location of a user is not based on the city or hometown they may have listed and is also separate from any geographic networks that they may have joined.”
My guess is that the estimated number of people that will see your ad versus the actual number differs substantially. Does this matter? I think so. For instance, imagine if I’m a visitor to Florida versus a resident. The “Rehabs in Florida” advertisement most likely won’t be as appealing for visitors. Facebook could easily determine that I’m a visitor since my current location varies significantly from what I’ve actually entered in my profile.
Facebook has had challenges in developing more relevant advertisements and I think this is just one example of an area that Facebook could improve. Perhaps Facebook could add one more option to their targeting form when creating a new advertisement which allows the user to select between “Residents & Visitors, Only Visitors or Only Residents.” Just a thought!
Facebook Connect: The Alternative to OpenID
Thursday, July 24th, 2008Yesterday Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Connect and with it the opportunity for sites around the web to easily integrate into the largest “social graph” on the web. The pre-f8 hype along with MySpace’s Data Availability initiative and Google’s Friend Connect program ended up muting much of the buzz that was intended for Facebook Connect. Whether or not it was buzzed about, Facebook Connect could have a substantial impact on the future of the web as Om Malik points out.
I agree with Om and I think that Facebook Connect could truly be game changing. As many industry thought leaders were saying last night at f8, Facebook Connect is the alternative to OpenID.
Facebook’s Missed Brand Opportunity
Monday, July 21st, 2008In speaking with Peter Corbett with iStrategyLabs the other day over dinner, we realized that there was one missing opportunity on Facebook which could be used to help brands and their pages get promoted more effectively. If users could tag brand instances the same way that you can currently tag users, there would be a large promotional opportunity. For instance, imagine if you take a picture of yourself next to your car and would like to tag it as “MINI Cooper”.
If you were actually a fan of the MINI Cooper on Facebook, you would be able to tag the photo and that photo would be displayed on the brand’s page. This way you don’t need to individually navigate to and upload photos on the actual brand’s page. It’s a great opportunity for brands and a great way to extend the existing platform. Facebook videos can currently be tagged as well so that would be yet another opportunity for Facebook.
There are a number of competitive services that are working to develop brand tagging in media some of which are completely automated. While I can see this technology being useful, enabling users to tag images and videos with brands themselves would be sufficient in my own opinion. Do you think tagging images and videos with brands would be smart? Why hasn’t Facebook done this yet?
Facebook Mini-Feed Comments Get An Update
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008Last month Facebook released the first version of mini-feed comments. I claimed that it was another step for Facebook toward FriendFeed functionality. Apparently not enough people were commenting though because Facebook has since made a slight change as MG Siegler pointed out yesterday. Rather than displaying a plus sign which potentially didn’t signify “comments” for some users, so Facebook has decided to go ahead and spell it out.
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