Thursday, 23 August 2007

Plans to Offer Targeted Advertising on Facebook

Having seen that Cadburys was bringing back Wisper due to social networks, I decided to research further into these social networks to see what they were doing about advertising. When reviewing Facebook, I found that they are to launch an advertising system that will allow marketers to target users with ads based on the large amounts of information people freely provide about themselves on the site.
They hope to produce a system that predicts what products and services users might be interested in, even before they have specifically mentioned an interest. The company aims to accomplish what Google did with AdWords, which allows anyone to place ads next to search results by buying keywords online.
The service allows advertisers to visit a website to choose a wider variety of characteristics for the users who should see their ads, such as favourite activities and preferred music. However, advertisers would not be able to access personal information about the Facebook users. These ads would appear on the "news feed" of each user's page and not as on banner ads and boxed flyers that appear on the borders of the site at present.

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