Social media for the Paranoid

Ever looked at the ads on Facebook?

Well sort of – after all they do occupy the right hand column on the webpage.

So why are the ads that I see so much worse than the ads on Google?

All I get are ads for herbal medicines that make my skin look younger  – don’t they know that I’m a Brit and so I drink gallons of black herbs with milk?

I think the key issue is that on Facebook advertisers only have indirect clues as to what you want to do. Given Facebook’s origin as a dating site a lot of these clues are about relationship status.

So ideally  when your relationship status changes from “married” to “single” they can show you a dating service – alas that is not an option with the current advertising selection method – so you just have to look for single people.

Puritanically, according to the Facebook advertising rules, they can not show you the same ad if your relationship changes the other way.

Then it turns out that according to the same rules you have to show your ad to either  men or women – not both – so you are out of luck if you swing both ways.

This all adds up to Facebook being a lot closer to a magazine ad than a Google advertisement. With a Google you know what the user is looking for, and you can respond at that moment. Very different form of advertising. I don’t belong to the demographic that reads Cosmo magazine – even though the articles look great, especially the “best swimwear”, so I don’t get to see those Ads.

So when I read that Facebook is overtaking Google search in terms of ‘face time” eg time reading the page, writing a message, or searching for friends, I really don’t care because what is relevant to advertisers is “engagement time” eg search time looking for something. Now if I could see that the user was searching for single friends then I might want to display an ad for a dating site.

Equally if I could monitor the IM messages to and from that user and look for keywords I would also be better able to judge what that user wanted at that time. That, of course, is what Google does on gmail.

Alas, most of the advertisements I have seen on gmail have been for sump pumps – and indeed I bought two only this morning. Of course I could have run a sump pump campaign on Facebook aimed at guys in New England – but alas few of us have joined the “flooded basement appreciation society”, so we are hard to identify.

Now what Facebook seems to be doing is driving up the amount of information that users share publicly to drive up the number of page views and time on the site. I would suggest that they improve their advertisement filters. A simple filter that says “advertise if the status of this user characteristic has changed in the last 24 hours” would be great. Least for targeting people changing sex.

Fortunately I am really only interested in changing my age – downwards, so I’ll keep drinking the Facebook Koolaid – least the herbal variety that they advertise so often.