Adding to today’s announcement of MySpace SelfServe Ads and AOL’s acquisition of Quigo, Facebook just released the news about its much anticipated and overly hyped social ads program.
The official press release highlights three components of the Facebook ad programs.
Facebook Pages – where businesses can create their own pages with the Facebook network to showcase their products and services with the complete facilities and applications open to regular Facebook users. Yes, Facebook is also now a social network for business.
Social Ads – Facebook will use the power of “peer pressure” in advertising as Ad units that will be serve on Facebook network will now include actions taken by members friends together with the ad campaigns from advertisers. Seems like a mini-review embedded within the ads.? Facebook calls it social action.
Insights – Facebook gives marketeers valuable metrics about fan demographics, ad performance and trends and other useful data to improve ad targeting within the Facebook network. Hopefully Facebook will not divulge member data as well.
This announcement had to come out right after Google announced its Open Handset Alliance which created quite a stir yesterday. Although different in nature, this announcement from Facebook is somehow geared towards pouring cold water on the Google announcement hype.
Whether this Facebook announcement was able to steal the hype and interest on the Google mobile software is not an important question to ask, but more importantly, will the Facebook ads succeed in getting a piece of the advertising success that Google’s Adwords is bringing in to the Google account?
