Over the weekend, Facebook introduced a new way to entice your advertising audience: use their friends. Now, when you create an ad for a fan page or group on Facebook, you can select “Target users whose friends are connected to: _____.”
How is this helpful? Of course, the effects are yet to be seen, but the supposition is that targeting friends of fans will lead to better conversion and more effective use of advertising dollars. The key to this change is that when “Friends of connections” is added, the ad will appear to a prospective fan, followed by the name of their friend who is already a fan. The ad plus the friend’s name will encourage them to become a fan out of admiration or peer pressure from their core relationships. Here’s an example of how it works.
Over the weekend, the ACU fan page awareness ad was updated to target friends of connections to the ACU fan page. Now, the ad will be ACU alumni, but not already fans of ACU). They will see this ad:
Not only does the ad show the original message that I created, but it also attaches “Scott Kilmer is a fan,” which will obviously make all 53 people rush to their desks, laptops and phones to join this glorious community! The referral system is completely automated. The only difference is that now our ad is targeted to friends of the 8,446 fans.
The numbers for this new feature are a little troubling. When I activated this feature, Facebook estimated that only 980 people fit this category (alumni non-fans whose friends are fans of ACU), while there are close to 15,000 disconnected ACU alumni on Facebook. I hope this number will rise significantly as the new feature rolls out across Facebook’s servers.
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