Both
Google and Facebook represent veritable behemoths in the age of social content
sharing. While Facebook started as a
social network, the company as a whole appears to have grand ambitions of
creating search functionality that leverages the social graph for dishing up
relevant content to users. Conversely,
Google, classically a search provider, has stepped into the social arena by
creating Google+, ostensibly to better their search features.
While
both organizations appear to be edging ever closer to being outright
competitors in overlapping industries, each has a unique advantage when it
comes to their advertising arsenal. On
the one hand, Google recently passed the “one billion unique visitors per month”
threshold (Young, 2011). Each of these
visitors represents advertising impressions on a massive scale with the
potential to turn into click-throughs.
On the other hand, Facebook surpassed one billion total members in
October 2012 (Key Facts) and recently introduced a way in which general users
could pay a small fee to promote content that interests them to the top of
their friend’s news feeds (Sreenivasan, 2012).
With
both services, one overriding theme seems to be laying out a plan for what
needs to be achieved before ever beginning the process of advertising. Without a solid groundwork, money can be
wasted and you risk alienating potential customers by authorizing these
services to display irrelevant results to users. Likewise, industry professionals recommend a
form of A/B Testing where two versions of the same ad are created in order to
see which one performs the strongest. As
stated by Leyl Master Black of mashable.com, “You can then create a new ad that
is similar to your best-performing ad, but tweak it just a bit to see if you can
beat the previous performance” (2011).
Between
the two, Facebook appears to have an advantage in the way its advertisements
are presented. Not only are they prominently
placed within the website itself, they also include images. Including anything other than text within a
Google Ad would undoubtedly break the digital and minimalistic fung shui the
company has worked so hard to cultivate, but could conceivably appeal to the
more kinesthetic browsers of the web.
Merry Morud of searchenginewatch.com has a few interesting
recommendations when it comes to choosing images. Namely, Morud suggests selecting images that
contrast with Facebook’s typical blue theme, cropping the images so that they
deliver the most amount of emotional appeal while fitting within the ad box, choose
a blend of ethnicities if using photos of people and add other elements to the
text images like logos and branding.
As
many industry professionals will attest, there is no singular answer to
choosing an advertising platform. The
end-goal is of course to try and target a particular demographic, but how that’s
done varies from one company to another and each business has ways for an
organization to test their services rather inexpensively to see what works and
what doesn't.
References
Black,
L. (2011, August 29) Facebook Ads: 5 Tips for Success. Retrieved November 12,
2012 from http://mashable.com/2011/08/29/facebook-ads-tips/
Key
Facts (n.d.) Retrieved November 12, 2012 from http://newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts
Morud,
M. (2012, April 19) Facebook Ad Images – Tips for Killer Creative. Retrieved November
12, 2012 from http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2168805/Facebook-Ad-Images-Tips-for-Killer-Creative
Sreenivasan,
S. (2012, May 29) Facebook's tempting 'Promote' button for business. Retrieved November
12, 2012 from http://news.cnet.com/8301-33619_3-57443211-275/facebooks-tempting-promote-button-for-business/
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