Facebook and Visa Hook Up To Try And Raise Facebook’s Ad Revenue
June 24th, 2008 by Dave Allen
A shadowy social network group.
Facebook is getting an assist from Visa Inc.’s marketing machine in its struggle to lure more advertisers. To date, Facebook has not had as much success as was expected in garnering revenues from advertising. The plan with Visa appears to be aimed at small businesses who are using Facebook to look for new customers.
Michael Liedtke reports:
Visa’s service is designed to provide small-business owners with tools and tips on attracting new customers, trimming costs and other ways to make more money. Businesses that belong to the Visa network on Facebook also will be able to communicate with each other to share ideas or even negotiate deals. Internet search leader Google Inc. is providing some of the features on Visa’s business network, including maps, calendars, word processing and a new template for creating expense sheets and business cards. And The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur magazine will contribute articles addressing questions posed by businesses that belong to Visa’s Facebook network.
Facebook’s struggle to produce revenue from its site sounds similar to the problems that MySpace has been having. Facebook has 80 million users who play games, share photos, rate music and track their friends’ activities – the idea that they can be bothered to click through on an advertisement that is not relevant to them, and one that just randomly appears on their home page or profile, is a marketing stretch.
As Michael Liedtke writes:
…while the array of applications have helped make Facebook even more popular, few programs are producing revenue for the site, and Facebook still hasn’t proven that its social playground is an effective advertising forum. Finding the right advertising approach also has been a challenge for other social hangouts like News Corp.’s MySpace. Even Google, which runs the Internet’s most lucrative ad system, has had trouble marketing on social networks.
Advertisers and marketers are labouring under the assumption that the information that Facebook has gathered about its users makes it easy to target different groups of them. This is a dubious notion at best. They are a moving target.
As Liedtke points out: …..some advertisers fret that Facebook’s audience will resent commercials amid all the site’s frivolity. Others are leery about their brands showing up on Web pages featuring racy or unsavory content.
Stay tuned.
Tags: Advertising, Facebook, marketing, MySpace, social media, Social Networks, Visa
June 25th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Interesting concept…def agree with you that making that initial marketing contact (‘Facebooker’ actually clicking on ad) is going to be rather difficult. I think the many people that join Facebook enjoy it for the fact that there’s minimal ads. But we’ll see…some people want a Visa with Ushers face on it