Social Ads and Endorsements

Social Media is becoming pervasive today without many of us stopping to realize how we are part of the change happening around us.

We as consumers lead online by sharing reviews online for every product like movies, restaurants, hotels, travel experiences and our perceived decision uncertainties of retail brands. Some of us are active writing reviews and comments in online sites like yelp, movie sites, travel sites etc, while others are making it a habit to consume this information as word-of-mouth referrals and contributing to brand perceptions by our innocent questions comparing brands and the real product match behind the brands.

Facebook has introduced the concept of Social Ads where they will embed the ads as part of a social action of a user. From a business standpoint what I like about Facebook’s Social Ads is that we can actually find out how many users are available who fit our targeted profile before we sign up for an Ad. The disadvantage is that it is not well entrenched like a Google Ad so we do not have any market support on whether to select a PPC or a CPM model and what price is appropriate.

Joshua Porter has an excellent post on why he thinks Social Ads do now work

Amy Jo Kim started me thinking differently on the difference between the Google and the Facebook models. Google attracts users who further in the product cycle looking for something eg travel, product search etc and wants super short time-per-visit while Facebook wants super long time-per-visit with users being exposed to Social endorsements from trusted circle of friends.