Facebook is letting companies place ads on its mobile version for the first time, and to advertise on the log out screen, flowing the launch of its new ‘Premium’ service.
Users will see the new premium adverts from brand in their newsfeeds if a friend has “liked” the brand’s pages, for example.
Facebook said that adverts on the right-hand side and in news feeds on Facebook’s homepage have an average of five to 10 times more engagement than other adverts placed on the website.
The social networking giant has also added Offers, which lets businesses offer discounts to users that “like” their pages.
Facebook, which has 845 million monthly users, will also let businesses have their own branded pages with timelines, just like individuals.
The changes will happen from April, Facebook announced in its first-ever marketing conference.
Until now, Facebook has made no money from advertising on the mobile version of its site or its apps.
Facebook has more than 400 million users that view it on their mobiles, and there has been much speculation about how it would seek to make money from them.
Facebook makes most of its money from advertising sales, which accounted for 85% of its revenues of $3.7bn in 2011.
Advertising Vs. ‘Stories’
Facebook made the announcement at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in a rare East Coast appearance for a Silicon Valley company.
Rather than bombarding people with flashy ads, Facebook is urging companies to integrate themselves into what people are already doing on the site – talking to their friends and family, commenting on photos or posting news links.
‘The definition of the word “advertise” is to draw attention to,’ said Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice president of product. ‘The definition of a story is narration, which you’d think is what people prefer.’
Companies can continue to set up Facebook pages on their brands for free. They’d pay to insert updates into news feeds and elsewhere based on the number of fans they have. In other words, posting the message will remain free, but getting more people to see it will cost money.
Facebook will collect feedback and test how users respond as it rolls out the changes gradually. At first, users may see just one message a day from a brand inside their news feed, or even less. And they won’t see messages from random companies they are not connected to in some way – directly or through a friend.
The move follows the roll-out of adverts on users’ news feeds, which began in early January.
This means that brands a user has ‘liked’ will now be able to push ads into their news feeds.
The changes come ahead of Facebook’s initial public offering of stock, expected this spring.
The IPO could value the company at as much as $100 billion (£62billion). That means Facebook has to prove it can bring in real advertising revenue from massive brands.
Read the official Facebook Premium page here
