Facebook Advertising: Get With It?

One month into Facebook and I'm still trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing there. I go there regularly now, but don't really get the feeling it was built for people over 25. I'm not looking for a relationship, I don't really care what other people are listening to (I once did, but that was ~20 years ago), and I'm not specifically looking for friends.

But I go there nonetheless, probably because I'm interested in Facebook's rise to prominence, and definitely in order to figure out what this means for advertisers.

I've been running a couple tests of Facebook's two ad offerings - Facebook Flyers, and Flyer Pro. Flyer is a CPM-based offering ($2) and Flyer Pro is a CPC-based offering. With FlyerPro you can target specific networks, Male/Female, day of week, by country and/or city, relationship status and keyword. In my case, I'm targeting Google & Yahoo employee networks with an ad promoting my blog as indispensable to their SEM quest for knowledge.

My test campaign on FlyerPro is getting a 0.536% CTR [Oct 25 update: average CTR is now 0.35%]. I mainly wanted to run the test to see what CTR's Facebook can get from their contextual inventory, but also because it's early and I'll bet knowing how to advertise on Facebook becomes essential to any marketer's skillset.

I really don't know squat about Facebook as an advertising medium - and expect that very few people do - so I read a 60-page study tonight that Fox Interactive Media commissioned in conjunction with Carat and highly recommend it as does AdAge. The study is [I think] the first significant research into how creating a brand-related page impacts such measures as brand recall and purchase preference.