Facebook's search for a business model

It was obvious from the start that Facebook, and pretty much any of those Web 2.0 / Social Media businesses, must pursue a bait-and-switch strategy: first, build a big community by providing a well-designed service for free; next, invite the marketers and advertisers into the party. The challenge is how to do this without killing the goose. Twitter is next in line to cross this line while Facebook has been experimenting with mixed success in the past year or two.

The media has been selling us a good story about how great Facebook's business is. We have been looking for evidence to assess the credibility of this assertion. (See previous posts here and here.)

A guest post at ReadWriteWeb offers Peter Yared's view on what sort of marketing campaigns works and what doesn't on Facebook. It's one person's opinion but interesting nonetheless. The list of what doesn't work is much longer than what works.

In short, the post confirms that Facebook users want marketers to stay mostly in the shadows, and engage in interactions that last seconds, not even minutes. They also want to get something in return for any "engagement", which makes you wonder how marketers intend to get payback for the investment in these campaigns.

***

You may want to poke fun at the spectrum of marketing speak used in the article: "only one engagement feature per tab", "sweepstakes have ... no viral uptake", "the campaign being graded on the number of engagements", "the apps... got to be on brand", etc.

Comments

[Basil]

I think you hit the nail on the head! What aggrevates me is youtube.com video ads. I remember actually enjoying watching different videos on youtube, but now it seems I have an ad pop up that takes a large amount of bandwidth for me to download at home. Do these youtube ads payment go to youtube or the individuals who post the videos?

[Andrew Gelman]

Hey, Kaiser--didn't you get the memo? Mark Zuckerberg is rich rich rich rich rich. Therefore Facebook is a success.

[Malcolm C]

Good Info