So you may or may not have seen the study we did with the National College of Ireland on Facebook usage. Check it out. It’s good! The main science bits are:
- 71% of users looked at adverts on their Profile pages, 31% of users looked at adverts on the News Feed page (homepage).
- Users pay more attention (53% vs. 31%) to page updates in their News Feed Wall rather than adverts to the right-hand side of the Wall.
So we might have banner ad blindness going on around the web and maybe Google Ads on the right side of results don’t get much love but it seems for Facebook so far, ads work and people pay attention to them.
More importantly in my view is that people are naturally paying attention to information that shows up in their News Feed and a business is allowed to send their updates to this News Feed when someone Likes/Becomes a fan of the Business Page. So set up your Facebook Business Page and update on a regular basis. Tie it into a Marketing Calendar. The only cost is your time.
As a GMAIL user since 2004 I am totally blind to the adverts. In fact just now I had to double check that they are still showing (they are). My own experience with FB/LinkedIN adverts suggests that they are significantly better over adwords. Result: adwords budget chopped, FB and LinkedIN budget upped.