I visited the Technology for Marketing and Advertising 2008 conference in London earlier this month and attended an interesting seminar with Blake Chandlee, the Commercial Director of Facebook in the UK.

He started by regaling us with some pretty impressive user stats, and then took us through the advertising options on Facebook. He started out with Facebook Ads. 

Now, when I first started out in marketing I was told by my boss that there were ‘three golden rules’ of successful advertising, namely to deliver:

• the right message
• to the right person
• at the right time 

Let’s assume (for the sake of this debate) that we want people to purchase something. So, we try Facebook Ads. 

Indisputably, Facebook holds a lot of data on their users. On this basis, you can argue that via Facebook you should be able to target the right person (or people); and if you’ve a modicum of talent, one would hope that you could create a compelling message, thereby ticking the 'right message' box. 

There have been lots of people who’ve cross tested Facebook Ads and Google Adwords – a good example can be found here: http://blog.auinteractive.com/facebook-ads-dont-work-heres-proof  

End game is, Facebook Ads do not convert as well as Google Adwords.

The question is, why? 

I think that if we go back to the ‘golden rules’, it’s pretty obvious. It’s all about timing.  Now, I’m totally up for the debate on this one, but when I go to Facebook I’m not in the market to make a purchase. When I go to Facebook I’m there because I want to make contact with my friends.  Therein lies the problem. I think that this is where Facebook advertising struggles. Even if the ad is pretty targeted, the timing’s off. The ads are at odds with people’s Facebook usage. 

If I want to make a purchase, I would be more inclined to head over to my favourite search engine and maybe do a bit of research. Or, depending on what I was looking to purchase, I might just go directly to a favoured site. For example, if I was interested in buying a book I might just head straight to Amazon and have a look at their recommendations based on my previous purchasing behaviour. 

So, how can you get advertising in front of Facebook users in a way which is more in line with the way they use Facebook?  

Blake had the answer - he went on to talk about Facebook Pages.

You can create a Facebook Page for your brand, and it’s free!  Now, for my money, this is a really interesting proposition – here’s an opportunity for you to engage with people who are interested enough in your brand to become a ‘fan’. Rather than interrupting users’ social media experience, you are working your brand into the very fabric of the social network. If users like your brand enough to become a ‘fan’, this appears in their mini feed. They may also like you enough to actively promote you to their friends. 

There’s lots you can do via your brand’s Facebook page – you can create forum topics to spark discussion; and you can even message your fans. Nice, huh?  

So, let’s get back to our end game. We want people to purchase something, remember? Let’s imagine that we’ve set up our brand, got ourselves some fans, and it’s all looking rosy. How do we convert these lovely people, to encourage them to purchase from us?

Simple – we can send them a message regarding whatever we want them to buy. Oh, and as we haven’t had to pay for the advert, we could even do a money-off offer or something similar. 

Now, in my mind, that’s where the real value lies, as not only have we actively engaged with our consumers and given them a space to communicate with us, we have also been able to deliver them an offer – all for free.  

This begs the question, given that Facebook needs to monetise the site: why haven't they gone with Facebook Pages?  

How? Perhaps a small charge to set up the page, plus charges to communicate with your fans – perhaps on a per fan basis? I’d also look to offer a premium Facebook Page for brands who want additional functionality – like the ability to select which fans they want to communicate with, rather than only offering a "communicate with all" option. This is all off the cuff -- there must be loads of ways to monetise the pages. 

So…am I right? Would love to hear your thoughts :)