Facebook and Google are competing a lot as of today, and in its new advertising strategy, Facebook is taking a leaf out of Google’s ad strategy and implementing it to its social media.There has been a constant attempt from Facebook to innovate time after time and advertisements are no exception to that. But the beauty with Facebook is that it has slowly transitioned from advertising as a message-delivering medium to a platform for social sharing. Needless to say it has been a radical approach. Now the Facebook advertising solution encourages the brands creating ads to make better “social media” relevant ads which can make its Facebook members to recommend and also share it with their friends.
When comparing Facebook with Google, one has to remember the past when Google had a choice to take money from advertisers to display their pages higher in the search ranking, but it decided to go the other way and in fact made the search engine as best as it could be. Intially, when Google was launched, its founders had no idea as to how they would make money. All they thought was that if they get in more people to use their product, eventually they would figure out a way to earn money. And it was exactly what happened.
Similar to google, Facebook too didn’t create a new category on its own but actually refined an existing category namely the social network.. Like Google, Facebook figured that if it got enough people in its network and if it improved its social network continuously, it would eventually figure out a way to earn money.
Initially Facebook made a mess of of its advertising strategy by introducing Beacn, the advertising platform as it informed friends of every purchase that one makes. Facebook has since realised its mistake and is moving towards the correct direction.
With the advent of time, Facebook’s ad strategy is slowly becoming clearer. Actually, Facebook’s strategy, like Google’s, is to not only improve its social network, feel and experience, but also to improve the advertising as well. Facebook allows business brands to create their own brand page free of cost and doesn’t make a dime on any of the pages set up by advertisers. As a marketer, it may seem that all is well for them as they have got a free brand page without spending any money. There may be a thought as to why one should spend for Facebook ads. The reason one has to buy ads on Facebook goes to the heart of why one needs to advertise in the first place. A simple reason is that a brand has to grow and reach out to new audience who have heard little or nothing about it. One can get only so far keeping their base happy. What one needs to do is to reach beyond them.
The best way to do this would be to approach friends of that base. Why? It’s because friends tend to have a halo effect on their other friends and can influence their decisions too.That’s the thinking behind two recent announcements from Facebook. One is a new ad unit The other is a set of metrics that will help administrators create better brand Pages.
The combination of the two reveals what Facebook’s future strategy looks like. Facebook is actually putting pressure on advertisers to create better content for their brand Pages. If they do, those brands will have a better chance of winning over friends of fans either by advertising or by creating something viral. Henceforth, brands will be friends or friends of friends rather than being a spammer and trying to bombard the consciousness of random target audience.
Social networking is still new, but so was search engine once. While figuring out how to make money off of search seems obvious in retrospect, it clearly wasn’t at the time of its inception. In the same way, someday we will look back at how Facebook invented social media advertising and wonder why no one thought of it sooner.
