Facebook gold rush… The social network giant has announced on a few new advertising options yesterday at the company’s fMC event, after informing about the arrival of the Timeline for pages. The main headline is the expected landing of ads into the mobile platform but it wasn’t the only thing interesting.
Facebook’s director of global business marketing, Mike Hoefflinger, has introduced all the new advertising possibilities united under a new premium advertising solution called “Reach Generator”, which according to Hoefflinger can reach for at least 75% of the page’s fans and increases three times more the ROI compared to the prior ad units.
As you can see from the image above, the premium Reach Generator solution includes (from left to right) fixed post on the company’s Facebook page, ads on the user’s right sidebar, Sponsored Stories in the user’s News Feed, Sponsored Stories for the user’s mobile News Feed and a giant ad on the logout page.
In addition, Facebook officially presented “Offers”- Deals, coupons and discounts ads that were already in testing since December 2011. The Reach Generator isn’t a PPC/CPC/CPM program, but works on a fixed monthly payment basis which depends on the page’s fan-base (don’t expect it would be cheap). According to early experimenting with Ben & Jerry’s, it reached for the page’s 98% fan-base.
I assume that the most alluring ad option for advertisers is the arrival of Sponsored Stories to Facebook’s giant mobile community (at least 425 million users). While from Facebook side it provides the social network a way to (finally) monetize this unexploited diamond mine, for marketers it is a great opportunity to reach for wider audiences.
But if mobile ads are the most alluring option, the logout ads are the most intriguing ones. Facebook says that about 37 million people are logging out from the social network every day just in the U.S. and 105 million logging out every month. A giant ad on the logout page is certainly a way to attract this, yet again unexploited, people’s attention. This option will begin rolling out on April.
Overall, it looks like that Facebook is trying to create “easy life” for marketers and businesses as the social network will take care of most of the marketing work in return to a fixed monthly fee. Although it is soon to tell how effective this program will actually be, it does strikes as promising.
Hoefflinger said in his presentation: “We are evolving from ads to stories. Ads are good, but stories are better”. Although it truly can reflect the general Facebook’s advertising concept I already saw many that calling the fMC, “For More Cash”…