When the Facebook platform launched over two years ago, a new advertising model was built: pay per install. Since then, millions of dollars have been spent on application install campaigns. Many brands are realizing that it’s much more difficult to get users returning on a regular basis to your applications though and as such this model has some serious weaknesses. That’s why many advertisers are turning to the “pay per fan” model.
As Facebook promotes in their current Google advertisements, “Facebook Pages let you remarket to your customers for free”. That’s a significant differentiator from applications which have no guarantee that you’ll be able to contact the users again. While new Facebook Page fans can always unsubscribe from your feed stories, a greater percentage remain subscribed. We’ve spoken with a number of ad networks that are attempting this new model and so far the response has been positive.
As far as I know, selling fans to brands is not against the Facebook terms, however given that Facebook is trying to sell the same thing, I could see some tension building between the two parties. No matter what you source of new Facebook is, as long as the fans go to Facebook, the company is never really losing though. uSocial, is one company that is trying to sell fans to advertisers, however the turnaround time is fairly delayed.
uSocial claims that the new fans will be “targeted” but provides no other details. It’s also a controversial marketing tactic, but in a world where the number of fans you have is important to your brand’s perception, why not purchase a few thousand fans? This appears to be the mindset of many advertisers that are currently paying for new fans on their page.
While the majority of branded applications fail to attract repeat users, fans can be “remarketed” to as Facebook likes to say. That’s why we’ll most likely see a surge in the “Pay Per Fan” advertising market. Have you seen advertisers entering this space? Do you think it’s a worthwhile investment to pay for Facebook Page fans?
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Not if they will just hide your updates from their main feed ^_^
Comment by Facebook User — October 9, 2009 @ 12:37 pm
I guess one of the most interesting factors here is what happens if Facebook try to make live search a key element and allow you to filter the stream etc? One of the first people to get filtered from my stream would be brands that I have fanned but have no connection to.
The other thing that still astounds me is the fact that a company can run ads on one part of their site charging to have people re-directed to another part of your site! Fair play to them I suppose
Comment by Niall Harbison — October 9, 2009 @ 4:33 pm
Every brands/company should promote their business/Product by increasing the fans not by BUYING to get the benefits for long period
have a nice day
Comment by facebook application — October 13, 2009 @ 3:10 am
They disapear I payed and they are not anymore on their site.
Comment by Anna — January 13, 2010 @ 11:42 am
I paid $600 last year in advertising to build a generic fan page that would be fanned by a highly targeted audience I was hoping to leverage from…. Managed to pick up 12,500 fans nearly all living in the same city.
Competitor page reported me to Facebook who subsequently blocked my publishing rights, despite the other group being of the same orientation as me, except far less fans. I then bought a domain name and started a small blogging website in an attempt to have the publishing rights re-instated, but no success.
I've tried contacting Facebook about this a number of times to no real response. Contacting Facebook is near impossible it seems.
Comment by Gavin — April 13, 2010 @ 8:57 pm
real fans in just $15 for 1K
Add me on skype khadija.shabbir134u
Comment by Cecilie Rou Madsen — February 2, 2012 @ 2:07 am