Will Facebook Flyers Fly?
If you are looking for an escort, then you might want to turn to Facebook. It is one of the services that is being promoted via Facebook Flyers, Facebook’s own ad-service. (Readers tell us they have been around for about 18 months, though off late we are seeing more of them.) It is not cheap – you pay $10 per 5000 impressions. Will this be the Facebook’s version of AdSense? Meanwhile others are trying their own versions of ads-within-Facebook apps. Rock You, a Palo Alto-based start-up, has started to play around and using its FB-rank to make money. There is some talk, that Rock You is going to charge lesser-known app developer and will promote them inside their app.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
This is an interesting idea. I took a look at it and I think it will be a great tool to promote events. I would also like to see the option to not only target colleges and areas but also companies.
$10 for 5000 people seeing their flyer (assuming they actually look at it and read it) seems like a good deal for groups like bands playing a gig in a college town, e.g., targeting a specific college with the ad.
I wonder if and how other types of groups will use the ads – restaurants? festivals? and if other ads will evolve on facebook.
What’s new, exactly? There have been facebook flyers for something like 18-24 months now.
Not sure about the 18-24 months, but it seems that there has been some serious push towards this end. i might actually try them out for the heck of it… and do a little promotion for one of our sites.
CPM of $2, that is not too expensive. If you are able to target specific items such as users interests and specific groups than I could see this service getting a lot of traction.
Yeah! $2 CPM is pretty inexpensive considering that they allow 200 characters plus a proper image in the flyer ad. Unfortunately, it’s not open for people outside the US yet.
A couple of noteworthy conditions are: 1. Even if the site was down during the campaign, a refund will not be issued; 2. The charge is based on CPM and not click through action. It is not clear to me why they would make these conditions. I will be interested in knowing yours and other readers thoughts on these.
Why is this news? Flyers have been up for the last year at least. My startup purchased a bunch of them before we realized that click-throughs are almost non existant. From that 5000 impressions you might only get 1 or 2 click-throughs.
matt, maybe i just have discovered the flyers – i am not sure if they were this obvious. at least for past six months when i have used facebook prior to this current push!
Jack is correct to say flyers have been around 18-24 months… maybe even longer. However in the past you could only buy flyers within college networks and to buy flyers at a network that you were not a member of was more expensive than your own network.
I believe now you can buy flyers at any network (college, regional, work, etc… maybe not high school) and its all the same price.
Just a little question: with all of us noobs coming to Facebook, do you think that these flyers will become more effective in terms of driving click throughs etc.
Om,
Of course not. That’s why they aren’t doing a CPC advertising model. There are no C’s happening. :-)
I’ve run a few Flyer campaigns with varying success; the genre of the ad seemed to be the biggest driver of success (or lack of), with some ads getting hundreds of clicks in a batch of 5000, and others getting fewer than 10.
Admittedly, my experimental data isn’t exactly wonderful, but I suspect davidu (above) is right…
I think Facebook users learn relatively quickly to tune the banner ads out. Ads embedded in the mini news feed seem much more effective for them.
As from a perspective of both a student organisation leader as well as working with social marketing I feel that these could be useful for my student organisation in the sense that there are very few other well targetted ad-mediums available to me (I would value the way that you can choose which campus it’s displayed at).
Also I would probably also publish all the info on the event in the flyer text and require less click-through (even though it would be beneficial). However – I still agree with many here that the cost is too high and it’s hard to follow-up on results.