Is advertising on Facebook best suited to branding
I am out at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas and I had an interesting conversation with Carsten Cumbrowski about advertising on social networks, specifically Facebook Carsten made argument that Facebook can be a very good site to advertise on from a branding perspective.
The king of branding is traditional media. When you advertise on traditional media like TV, radio or print, it is always difficult to tell how well the campaign performed from a conversion perspective. You can estimate that X number of people heard, watched or read your ad, but that is about all. Your advertising campaign builds brand awareness and share of mind, which ultimately leads to more sales, but it is very difficult to translate one specific ad to that sale.
Why cannot advertising on Facebook be that way? Other online mediums like search are great for getting conversion, so why does a Facebook campaign have to mirror the search campaign? Why cannot the Facebook campaign be focused on building brand awareness?
An advertiser who focuses on group sponsorship on Facebook will build up brand awareness in this group. Without the focus being on conversions they will be able to join in the conversation without being too commercial. Instead they are building up their brand amongst their target audience and this should eventually translate into sales.
What do you think? Is advertising on Facebook best suited to branding?
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (4) : Feb 24th, 2008
February 24th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
[…] - Social Media Optimization wrote an interesting post today on Is advertising on Facebook best suited to brandingHere’s a quick excerptIs advertising on Facebook best suited to branding I am out at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas and I had an interesting conversation with Carsten Cumbrowski about advertising on social networks, specifically Facebook Carsten made argument that Facebook can be a very good site to advertise on from a branding perspective. The king of branding is traditional media. When you advertise on traditional media like TV, radio or print, it is always difficult to tell how well the campaign performed from a […]
February 25th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Is advertising on Facebook best suited to branding…
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February 25th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
In my experience, Facebook advertising is terrible for conversions, so I’d like to hope that it is at least good for branding. But, currently, we choose not to advertise on Facebook, mainly because the ROI is so difficult to measure (we don’t do much offline/”traditional” media advertising either, partly for the same reason).
February 29th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
As someone who was a member of Facebook since it was college-only in the very early expansion of it and also an advertising/PR professional, advertising on Facebook as it has been done has been a tremendous flop.
A previous post on this blog showed the example of Target and how it was successful on Facebook by only having the paid links go to Target’s Facebook site and by fostering community. With that in mind, there is a tremendous opportunity to build brand awareness through fostering community. There are a lot of communities that have more than 100,000 members. Just imagine if, say, Guinness had been the sponsor of the Guinness World Records Facebook page (among the largest groups on Facebook with millions of users), and for almost no cost had been able to gain free publicity from it and stay in touch with the community.