What Brand Marketers Want From FB this Holiday Season

It is widely understood that the evolution of Facebook’s platform inevitable. Despite the [ongoing] opposition from marketers, with threats to bring their social networking business elsewhere, they need to realize that Facebook will not, and perhaps cannot, retreat from its justified progression. Digital Technology changes, new regulations are implemented and the opportunities to capitalize on the business continue to emerge. But this reality doesn’t stop brand marketers from making wish lists for FB this holiday season. I will summarize the complaints/suggestions that marketers hope FB will respond to this holiday season.

First, they want more control over brand status updates. Although FB developed the Insights tool to target this exact issue [by providing analytics which measure the impact of brand pages], they want to be able to communicate and understand their increasing number of ‘fans’. Brand marketers want to: target fans through geographic locations, specific relationships (buyer or prospective buyer), and psychographic groups (moms v kids). Recent GPS technology and mobile opportunities are a good sign that FB can capitalize on this desire.

Second, marketers want to understand the impact of their investment. How successful are these campaigns? How did they impact page interaction, attrition rates, application engagement and purchasing? Are they bringing in new fans or simply retargeting old ones? This is an important service that will not only help brand marketers determine the success of their marketing dollars, but also measure the quality of fans that they are attracting, from one campaign to another. If FB does offer this service, they can further capitalize on its benefits and drum up more business based on concrete results.

Third, brand marketers are looking for ways to control the frequency of ads, on a user level. Unlike typical display advertising platforms, FB advertisers cannot set an exact frequency for ads, which is frustrating. Although the network does have its own algorithm and tool to prioritize ads based on click through rates (CTR), marketers want more.

Fourth, brand marketers want to include their own tracking URL within their display ads in ‘social contexts’. Social ad opportunities are a great way to engage directly with ad units since they incorporate users’ friends while providing word of mouth opportunities, however their inability to include third party tracking makes it difficult for brands to track downstream actions. The blogger recommends using a hybrid that serves the dual purpose of keeping users within FB while allowing brands to track activities on a brand page.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, brand marketers want competitive separation. Like in display publishing, marketers want the ability to exclude competitors ads from the same page as their ads. They argue that seeing a Honda ad on the same page as a Toyota ad defeats the whole purpose of an ad. Currently, FB marketplace cannot control this, but there is hope that they will incorporate some capabilities to support this need in the future.

In fact, the blogger is optimistic that if Facebook continues to innovate, marketers will get most of their wish list in 2012. But of course innovation means evolution, so if you marketers want more services, you’re going to have to accept [and embrace] the progression of Facebook.