I just celebrated my birthday about a month ago, and received the obligatory birthday wishes on my Facebook wall. It makes me happy to see all those birthday wishes. I’m a bit of a ham when it comes to my own birthday celebrations. But for Vikki Ortiz Healy over at the Chicago Tribune, such Facebook wishes are a plight of insincerity in the digital era.
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Over the past month Facebook has been testing out an upgraded version of the Facebook gift shop and as of last night the company announced the roll out of the upgraded service to all users. The new gift shop will include music gifts from Lala (as we wrote yesterday) and branded sports gifts. If AdNectar research which suggests branded gifts are 1,000 percent more effective is accurate, the sport gifts could turn into a big business.
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Facebook has been slowly rolling out tests to select developers that want to integrate with the Facebook gift shop. As of today there are approximately 5 companies that have been participating in tests: American Greetings, RealGifts, JibJab, GreetBeatz, and someecards. The latter three only recently began showing up in the gift shop. However Facebook has been testing out the gift shop as a platform for developers to sell virtual gifts over the past few months.
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According to data provided by AdNectar, branded virtual goods receive ten times the interaction level of their non-branded counterparts. That number references the percentage of people that click on or send a gift after seeing it. The strong results have driven numerous corporations to launch branded gift campaigns across numerous social platforms. AdNectar has now run campaigns for Fisher Price, Godiva, Gilette, Procter & Gamble, Trident Gum, and Malibu, just to name a few.
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“Passively” extracting data from user profiles on social networks has been a head-scratching issue for network owners and marketers alike. It typically makes users feel uncomfortable when targeted ads on social networks seemingly have to do with something that would only be known through their profile information, and such privacy issues make it difficult for advertisers to move beyond this obstacle.
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With the boom in social gaming on Facebook, one doesn’t have to look to far to see what revenue sources currently exist for virtual economies. Facebook is rapidly becoming a center of the virtual economy which is why we are seeing the rise of companies built around virtual transactions. Today, AdNectar released a white paper which discusses the state of branded gifting within social media.
Facebook has been selling virtual gifts for a while now but even Facebook is finding it to be a challenging pitch to large brands as it’s a non-traditional advertising model and companies don’t know how to account for virtual gift campaigns. Despite the uphill battle, Facebook is still launching a number of branding gifting campaigns including a current one for the Watchmen movie which just came out.
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If you thought Facebook birthday notifications were helpful reminders of your friends’ big day, then you’ll love the new feature Facebook added today. You can now send a virtual birthday gift to your friends up to seven days in advance of their actual (listed) birthday. Facebook is offering two options for the new early birthday gift delivery: directly from your friend’s wall or via Facebook birthday e-mail reminders, which contain a direct link to send your friend an early birthday gift.
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A few months back, we asked if Facebook’s gifting application could become a billion dollar idea for the popular social network. Maybe Facebook is wondering the same thing.
Last night I signed onto Facebook and saw on my notifications tab that it was my friend Ken’s birthday. I don’t typically send a virtual greeting card or gift to friends on Facebook–I prefer to write on their wall, send them a private message or give them a call. So instead of clicking on the option to send Ken a greeting card, I clicked on his user name instead, expecting to be redirected to Ken’s profile where I’d be able to write on his wall.
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