Facebook Could Be The Next Advertising Giant

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Facebook has recently overthrown Google as the number 1 most visited site in the U.S.

It is just a matter of time that Facebook would become the number one most visited site globally.

This also means that Facebook is expected to earn more revenue than before and might one day reach the same monetary success Google is enjoying now (since ads revenue thrives on traffic).

Facebook has an attractive ad platform. It can target audiences based on demographics and connections, both of which Google failed to provide.

Targeting the desired audience ensures money well spent.

On top of that, Facebook links its ads with the viewer’s network of friends; giving advertisers the extra bonus. When our friends  “endorses” the ad, we tend to give the ad a second look, don’t we?

Facebook Is Sticky

Last September, Nielsen revealed that users spent twice as much time on Facebook than on Google. It didn’t come as a surprise to me because Google helps its searchers reach their information destination as quickly as possible, while Facebook makes users spend more time socializing and playing games on its site.

What has time spent got to do with ads?

To explain this, we can use the analogy of an ad placed on a train (Facebook) versus an ad placed along a walkway (Google). Most people would spend a longer time on a train than on a walkway, and that translates to longer “impression time” for the former ad.

The train ad is like the one displayed below while I was playing Farmville.

Keywords Based Ads Still Effective

Google Adwords still has a huge part to play as a leading digital advertising platform. The fact that searchers are searching for a particular piece of information at the very moment they are on Google, makes ads more targeted and attractive to users as well.

That is probably one area that Facebook hasn’t been able to match up with.

Summing Up

With Facebook’s powerful targeted ad platform, advertising on its site is certainly attractive. It has a fair chance to be the next digital ad platform giant, especially if it continues to leverage on the data users provide Facebook with. Who knows that one day Facebook could come up with its own search engine that combines both algorithm and social search into one, creating the perfect ad platform that we all can only imagine now.