Facebook Starts The Dreaded “In Feed” Advertising Roll Out
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Jan 11, 2012
It’s been a long time coming, but most of us knew that it was inevitable: Facebook have opened a facility to place ads within user’s own new feeds. How exactly does it work and what does it mean for marketers and users of the platform? Let’s take a look.
Facebook “Featured” Stories
You may not have seen the new adverts yet as the social media giant is rolling them out gradually, just like they always do. The new ads are labeled as “featured”, which will probably confuse a lot of people considering they already have “sponsored” for some ads and “Featured” for popular news stories that are made bigger and more prominent.
Facebook have been cryptic about their plans for the feature, firstly saying they plan to have no more than one sponsored story in each news feed per day. Now they’re taking that statement back saying there may be more sponsored stories if a person visits their news feed a lot. The ads are supposedly labeled clearly to let users know they are sponsored but we disagree. The labeling could be clearer.
How does it work?
Facebook has released a guide to featured stories on their own website. Businesses will be able to pay to feature a post so that there’s a better chance users will notice it. If you like a certain Facebook page, some of your friends will see the stories and others will miss them. The business owner can opt to pay to feature the story- you’re more likely to see it in your feed and your friends are more likely to see it.
If you have shared a story before and the business owner decides to make it a featured story, it will be shown to the same people that you originally shared it with.
Examples of Featured stories:
- When a page you like posts something new
- When a friend likes something
- When a friend checks in somewhere, plays a game or uses an app
These advertisements are stories, so they can’t be blocked or turned off completely, although users can try the usual tricks to block them out: hiding stories from a particular person, etc.
Facebook are likely to take a lot of heat for the new advertisements, and they have previously experimented with ad placements in the news feeds with little success. If the roll out works, however, we could have a new marketing tool in our social media marketing arsenal, and that’s always a positive.
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