Getting Smart With Facebook Fan Boxes On Third Party Sites
I was browsing the web at the weekend when I came across a couple of Facebook ad placements that I thought were very interesting. As you can see from the screen shot that I took below on Youtube the ad placement was in fact a Facebook Fan box that was displaying as a regular advert so as you could basically click on the advert within Youtube and instantly be a fan of Kiss metrics on Facebook as a result. I saw the same advert a few minutes later on Techcrunch which got me thinking about how effective the advert was and if it was smart social media advertising or something that was capturing meaningless fans? There is an argument for both sides displayed below…
Innovative Facebook Box Placement
Yes It Is a Good Idea
There is no new technology here. Facebook didn’t start offering this to users all of a sudden. What Kiss metrics (the people running the advert) have done is simple use their Facebook fan box to display instead of an advert. They are running then on sites that they think are relevant to their niche such as Techcrunch and Chris Pirillo videos on Youtube in order to capture as many fans as possible. They are probably paying a fairly high cost per acquisition for fans but instead of people just seeing adverts (that we all pretty much ignore anyway) Kiss are capturing people that they can push content out to in their stream for as long as they are fans of the page. So instead of thinking of the cost to place the advertisements as a once off you have to look at the bigger picture and think that Kiss will have huge amount of fans that they can push content out to for a long time in to the future which should significantly reduce the cost of the original ads.
No It Is A Bad Idea
I nearly clicked on the “become a fan” button purely out of the need to see what was going on and what sort of brand would be using such an innovative ad format. I nearly did but crucially I didn’t as I am smart enough to know that I don’t want an analytics company pushing their content out in to my Facebook stream. I did however click through to the page to see what was going on and was sad to see that even though they had ads running and plenty of people coming to their site they had not updated since the 12th of March and most of their content was just links to their own blog. Hardly compelling. Lets imagine another company did something similar in a more compelling way though, would it work? I doubt it. You don’t just want anybody to become a fan of your Facebook page, you want people who know your business, people who actually want to interact with you. It all goes back to the numbers game and as I always say I’d much rather 100 engaged fans than 10,000 people who think you are spamming them. It’s just not targeted enough, I mean yes I read Techcrunch but I simply don’t care about Kiss analytics and they are never going to convert me in to a customer. The Facebook box works great on your own site (we have one in the sidebar on this site which converts plenty of the readers here in to long term fans) but I do wonder what happens when you put it on a third party site? The link is diminished and people are not going to become fans unless they know what it is. You also have to take into consideration Facebook’s plans to make the Facebook fan element less important as well. The other thing to take in to consideration is that I personally saw those ads running the only 2 times I was on the internet all weekend and on 2 of the biggest sites around yet they have a miserable 400 odd fans, looks like people are not clicking through and becoming a fan to me and if they don’t do that the Facebook box has no message or real branding that people will remember.
Summary
Not a bad idea and a bit of innovative thinking is never a bad idea when it comes to advertising that we mostly all ignore now anyway but you just have to question if the fans that are converting are ever going to turn in to long term customers. There is no doubt that as a result of these ads Kiss are getting more fans but I would love to see a brand who started creating compelling content using this ad format to see if it worked. It’s a nice little trick to get some more fans and show that you are using social media but I am just not sure the return on investment is there. What do you reckon?
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