Looking for Free advertising on Facebook? You might have a chance for it now but unfortunately it isn’t within your control. This morning Sam Goldfarb of Tradimax sent me a screenshot of the image on the left. It was an advertisement for the AllFacebook fan page and while I was glad to see the advertisement, I hadn’t paid for it. This isn’t the first time that unpaid advertisements have been displayed.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about new Facebook personals advertisements but the company denied that it was little more than “a test running to a limited number of users that previews the profiles of a user’s friends”. While it may not have been personal advertisements it technically was a free advertisement for users. Now it appears that there are also free advertisements for Fan Pages.
Why would Facebook be displaying these types of advertisements? Ultimately I can’t be 100 percent sure but my guess is that Facebook wants to encourage others to run similar ads. By displaying successful implementations of Facebook ads it will encourage others to do the same. I have witnessed this phenomenon first hand. After testing out Facebook’s advertising platform I saw that other companies were quick to follow suit with similar advertisements.
The theory is that if the ad is working for someone else it should for me as well. Perhaps Facebook is simply just testing out click-thru rates on their own advertisements and this is little more than a test. While all I can do is speculate, it’s definitely interesting to see these ads popping up around the site. The advertisements also appear to be random and rare occurrences. Let us know if you see similar ones! What other reasons does Facebook have for displaying these ads?
Lucky you, Nick! What an interesting development, great scoop. The additional listing of not just one friend who is a fan, but all friends who are fans, only amplifies the passive endorsement.
You wrote recently about the inventory problem Facebook faces. It seems to me that running free ads only diminishes the ability for paying advertisers to get their Social Ads in front of the right eyeballs. What do you think about the connection there?
Comment by Jamie Scheu — December 1, 2008 @ 8:59 am
It has been happening on my Facebook for a few days already. Good job Facebook.
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