buzzmarketing daily

Yesterday facebook announced new ad targeting they’re calling “friends of connections” so that advertisers can now exclusively target friends of their current fans. Reported on by Inside Facebook and All Facebook, the targeting option allows for advertisers to serve ads exclusively to friends of fans they already have, resulting in ads such as the screenshot featured here.

I believe this is the most effective ad unit ever created. For the cost of $.50 to $1.00 per click, and/or virtually free impressions, you can take advantage of the indisputable power of word of mouth marketing and built-in testimonials. We all know that a friend’s recommendation is more powerful than any ad- can you imagine tv commercials or print ads which featured a picture of your friend in the right hand corner saying “I love this company!”?

Take the example in the screenshot here: When I see the ad, I see that 3 of my friends are fans of the product. That endorsement is so much more valuable than the ad copy itself.

In addition, many people’s friends are likely to be in the same category or target audience that the advertiser is looking for. When a local restaurant uses this targeting, it can take advantage of the fact that lots of it’s fans’ friends probably live in the same city. When I target moms for stride rite’s fan page, I can probably leverage the fact that many of stride rite’s mommy fans have facebook friends that are also moms.

I’ll be running A-B testing to prove the advantage that “friends of connections” targeting will provide, but my intuition tells it they will VERY successful for facebooks and its advertisers.

What are your thoughts? Can you think of a better, more efficient ad, anywhere?     -Dave Kerpen