Facebook wants more from users launches new ad platforms

Last week, Facebook re-launched its advertising platform. After it rolled out timeline feature for personal user profiles, the same will now be available for all brand pages by end of March. In addition, a brand new product called Reach Generator will allow brands to distribute via News Feed to up to 75 per cent of all their fans. Reach Generator, claims Facebook, will double the average reach of posts and engagement should more than double as more fans will engage, and expose the posts to their friends too.

With 45 million Facebook users in India (as per socialbakers.com data), the country’s social media crowd is second largest for the website and an important location for brands to connect with their consumers.

Gulshan Verma, Komli Media, Facebook’s only authorized reseller in India and works with 70 of the top 100 marketers in the country on their social media campaigns, says, “Marketers can connect to their user community not just through ads but through stories - these stories (starting from the brands page) allow the marketer to engage with the user in much more impactful ways. We see the new set of premium products on Facebook to be 40 per cent more engaging in terms of response rates and 80 per cent more likely to be remembered.”With more 55 per cent of the internet crowd accessing Facebook in India, youth brands are making the most of the Facebook craze, say digital marketing agencies.

In 2011, before airing seven new television spots, PepsiCo India released them on its Facebook page. The move led PepsiCo India’s fans to share the clips with their Facebook friends, creating buzz for the campaign before the official launch. The first spot alone was shared more than 10,000 times within the first hour of premiering on Facebook. Further, PepsiCo India also used Facebook to select 11 special brand ambassadors who attended every match of the Cricket World Cup, posting status updates and photos on the Pepsi India page. For all fans, an app enabled them to turn their uploaded photos into avatars to cheer the Indian team. The company is counted among the top 5 brands on Facebook with more than 2 million followers, according to web analytics’ site, Socialbakers.com.

Hareesh Tibrewala, joint CEO, Social Wavelength believes, “With these changes, the concept of websites will gradually become redundant and Facebook will start occupying the centre of the digital universe when it comes to connecting businesses with consumers.”

Facebook, only weeks from its IPO, is focused on targeting its 845 million global users with personalized marketing tools, as it competes with big internet giants like Google for online and mobile advertisers. The largest social media site already has 100 of the world's largest advertisers using the platform, according to its IPO filing.

With premium ads that will appear in four places – users’ News Feed, right-hand side, mobile News Feed and on the logout page, Facebook is attempting to monetize the mobile platform. Facebook has more than 425 million mobile users across the globe but is only now getting ready to run mobile ads.

Sunil Chandarana, CTO, EBS Interactive reasons that mobile is very a personal device. “But brands are getting smarter and today with sophisticated tools you can identify consumer behavior and have intelligence built in to not irritate users.”

The sentiments are shared by Tibrewala who points, “As consumers we don’t like ads, whether print, or TV or web or mobile ads. But paid messages are part of the ecosystem. Since real estate on a mobile phone is very limited, brands will need to create intelligent solutions to reach out paid communication to consumers.”

Verma of Komli Media adds that users are not only less forgiving of intrusions on their mobile phones but also because there’s limited screen space for content. “The key is that the brand must engage with the user and show how it is adding value to their lives and why mobile is part of that experience. As an example, take the eBay application that allows you to scan barcodes and see if the same product is available for less online,” he concludes.