DISQUS

Dan Peguine · 2 years ago

Is there a directory or something where we can see some more examples of pages?

I think that Facebook Page is significant because it is basically a recommendation directory that will be used mainly for local businesses. It will be a great way to find good restaurants etc'

Shawn Farner · 2 years ago

They haven't really loosened up on their tight restrictions, though. I tried to run some ads for my I Love Beer Pong blog and they shut them down - because of beer. I can't use the word beer on a prominently college-aged network?

I guess college students don't play beer pong.

Nick Burcher · 2 years ago

Impressed with the lengths you have gone to in analysing the new system and thought I could add something as I have just seen the first UK presentation of the Facebook Ads platform - Owen van Natta (Facebook's Chief Revenue Officer) flew in to bring everyone up to speed.

I have to say, I'm very impressed with it.

One slight amendment to your post - you can't make brand pages friends, you can only declare that you are a 'fan' of them. This is then declared in your Feeds - it is important for Facebook to make a distinction between Friends and Advertisers.

The Social Ads model is very clever too. An advertiser will upload a product tag line and a product image. If a user interacts with an ad page an update will be included in the feed and this will be combined with the ad message. (Eg if I bought a new pair of trainers my feed would describe my action, credit the brand and also show a picture.)

Rather than being a Google killer it has the potential to be a Google alternative - trust referral vs Google referral.

I have written a bit more about it on my blog here: http://www.nickburcher.com/2007/11/owen-van-natta-from-facebook-presents.html and will update this once I have had the time to play around a bit with the new Facebook system - planning to create a www.nickburcher.com page to support my blog!

Will Eagle · 2 years ago

I think it's not just local businesses that will benefit! Despite the skepticism as to who would choose to add a large brand to their friend list, I work at MTV and early on we had an MTV profile (deleted as it broke the tncs - farily enough), which was incredibly popular with a large number of people adding us to their friend list on a daily basis - unprompted - there are major brands out there that people want to be associated with. It's great for us because we can find people who like our content and show them how they can get it - e.g. lots of people who watch The Hills are on Facebook, and want to watch The Hills online. So we have a group for The Hills and we post links to watch episodes online. The response we've had has been really positive. Of course, any large brand needs to be aware of how they go about using FB to promote their services. People can smell bad exploitative marketing a mile off and will react to it.

I'm very excited about these developments.