What’s the story with Sponsored Stories?
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First of all, I’d just like to flag the fact I am cheating on my own blog. I have started contributing to another social media blog as well. I know it’s wrong and I feel a little sad about it too, but I feel it’s necessary in order to expand my profile and fame in order to realise my inevitable future as being named Time’s Person of the Year. I hope you will forgive me. In order not to anger Google by duplicating too much content, I have included a synthesised version of this article below. Should you want to read more, you can visit the original article by clicking the link I have provided conveniently at the end of the summarised post. Love, me.
If there’s one thing Zuckers has gotten much better at, it’s making money. Lord knows with an active population greater than the entire North American continent, it can’t be hard.
You can’t really blame them since the only thing facebook users like doing more than updating their statuses is complaining about the latest change to their profile layout.
Basically the major difference between Sponsored Stories and typical Premium ads is that Facebook turns brand interactions (incl. Page likes, application interactions and place check-ins) from your friends into little mini-ads – in effect changing these interactions into endorsements.
As it is, when a facebook friend likes a brand, let’s say Vodafone (just to use the least likely example), it will appear in your newsfeed briefly, where you will then also have the opportunity to like Vodafone(though obviously you would sooner stab yourself with rabies). The Sponsored Stories take this a little further by adding an advertisement (sorry… story) to the right of your profile/newsfeed (where all the other ads currently appear) like so:
Personally I think these are really good for big brands like Starbucks, McDonalds or Nike, where plenty of people know and like them enough to be hooked by a friend ‘recommendation’. However if your brand is not so well-known, I doubt you will get many people liking your page just because their friend did. In that case you are best sticking to Premium Ads, where you can at least provide some text along with your logo that will hopefully entice them to like you.
So as I said, there is an extended version of this article, which includes lots more pretty pictures and more detail about how you can use this feature, when it is available and how much it costs – you can find it here: http://www.socialmedianews.com.au/what-exactly-are-sponsored-stories-and-how-do-they-work/
2-2-11
I don’t want my status updates turned into ads for corporations. It feels like Facebook’s encouraging them to use me as a shill — and not giving me any share of the money they’re making on it. So far, everybody I’ve talked to who isn’t looking at it from a brand management perspective feels the same way. It makes Facebook look greedy and exploitative, and I expect there will be backlash against the brands. Remember a couple years ago when Facebook was using people’s photos on ads and some guy saw his wife’s picture on a “meet singles in your neighborhood” ad? Facebook responded by clarifying their terms of use so that there wouldn’t be any ambiguity they could do stuff like this. A better response would have been “oh sorry, we won’t do it again.”
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2-2-11
I agree with you jon – I think they are taking things a little too far when they are probably already richer than the whole of Africa. The good thing is that the ads will appear to the right-hand side of our profile rather than within the newsfeed, so it won’t be all that disruptive.
The photo issue was much, much worse I think. But still… I don’t even know why Zuckers wants all this money since he doesn’t seem to use it.
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