New Facebook ads strive to be ‘trusted referrals’

Cory Bergman November 6th, 2007

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took the wraps off the social networking site’s advertising strategy today. “Facebook Ads” have three components: 1) advertisers can create branded pages with custom applications 2) run targeted advertising and 3) track how users are interacting with their content and ads. As CNET explains, the most powerful part is this:

Facebook users can sign up as “fans” of that brand, install branded applications, and other activities that will all show up in their profiles’ “mini feeds” and on the “news feeds” that are broadcast to their friends lists.

“When people engage your page on Facebook, that’s going to spread information about your brand virally through the social graph,” Zuckerberg said. “It becomes a trusted referral.” That, my friends, has tremendous upside, as long as Facebook is very careful how it implents the service. For example, I don’t want my news feed cluttered with ads, but again, it would be my friends’ doing, not the advertisers directly. As Jeff Javis says, “The recommendations of peers matter more than the spam of advertisers.”