Targeting Facebook

The continued phenomenal growth in the number of Facebook subscribers has attracted the attention of the business world. The Nielsen Company, an expert in market research, formed an alliance with Facebook in September 2009 to help develop ways to use the Internet to market new products. Their research indicates that U.S. online advertising spending was down 2 percent, from August 2008 to August 2009,while the online advertising spend on the top social network and blogging sites increased 119 percent during the same time frame ("The Nielsen Company and Facebook form strategic alliance," 2009)).

So why are business moving their advertising dollars to social media sites? People today are bombarded with so many advertisements it is difficult for businesses to get their marketing messages through to potential customers. Businesses seeking to have a presence where their customers are, are looking to social networking sites. The good news for marketers is that Facebook provides a means for hypertargeting (also known as microtargeting), the ability to customize advertisements based on the user’s profile and contact information. This allows advertisers to post advertisements to potential customers who are more likely to be interested in their product, and consumers are offered advertisements customized to their preferences (Shih, 2009). According to Shih, “Their advertisers can target member profiles based on filters like location, gender, age, education, workplace, relationship status, relationship interest, and interest key words”(Shih, 2009, p. 82).

Hypertargeting allows marketers to tailor advertisements to the demographics and psychographic attributes of the target market, and the advertisements are more interesting to the customer because they are less concerned with the generic attributes of the product and relate more to the needs of the viewer (Shih, 2009).

The question is, do Facebook users welcome the advertisements as items of interest, or do they see them as intrusions, kind of “up in their face”?


References

The Nielsen Company and Facebook form strategic alliance. (2009). Retrieved July 16, 2010, from http://en-us.nielsen.com/content/nielsen/en_us/news/news_releases/2009/september/the_nielsen_company.html


Shih, C. (2009). The Facebook era: Tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff. Boston: Prentice Hall.