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Socially Acceptable Leads Facebook To Sponsored Ads

Facebook-Mediapost-BSponsored Results could become the newest advertising offering in Facebook’s search box, where ads appear alongside organic results linked to specific pages or places on the social network. Reports suggest that testing on these cost-per-click ads began last week. No doubt social data will also play a role in the type of ads that serve up.

Nearly half of CMOs have used social data to make predictions or forecasts, and nearly nine in 10 say this data has influenced business decisions, according to findings from a recent white paper. Aside from integrating social signals into search, social continues to make its way into other media, such as premium display ads.

"We use social as a communications strategy, but also as an "acquisition vehicle," though success has been less than stellar," said Colette Dill-Lerner, VP of Internet marketing at Guthy-Renker at the MediaPost OMMA Data & Targeting conference Wednesday.

The Bazaarvoice & The CMO Club Survey: Social Data Impacts CMO Decisions, Predictions & Forecasts identifies that CMOs use data to drive smarter decisions beyond marketing. Social reveals consumer sentiment and improves brand awareness, so they are most confident in social data analysis of products and services and in the impact on overall brand loyalty and awareness.

The survey represents brands with more than $1 billion in annual revenue, as well as smaller business-to-business and business-to-consumer businesses. CMOs use this data beyond marketing -- sharing data with other C-level executives at 97.3%; with functions, including sales, at 36.8%; and product management and development, at 35.1%.

Social signals support more than organic search engine ranking on google.com, bing.com and yahoo.com. Some 47.3% of all CMOs participating in the white paper admit to using social data to make predictions or forecasts, most often to project sales. Among agencies, about half are mostly responsible for reporting to CMOs on social data, followed by marketing research at 45.6%, and marketing communications at 45.6%.

Brand management teams make the most use of social data, according to 59.6% of CMOs. Other teams that access the data collected by marketing include sales at about 36.8%, customer experience and Web design at 36%, and product management and development at 35.1%.

It turns out that CMOs are most confident in social data's effectiveness in analyzing consumer sentiment toward individual products and product lines, rating their confidence level 6.4 out of 10 on average. Some 83.3% of CMOs believe social data is at least somewhat effective in indicating trends or patterns that may impact the business. And 77.9% find social data at least somewhat effective in analyzing the influence of individuals or groups.

Some 82.3% of CMOs are at least somewhat confident that their brands' social strategy has a measurable impact on brand awareness, while 81.5% are at least somewhat confident that their social initiative creates a measurable effect on brand loyalty.

2 comments about "Socially Acceptable Leads Facebook To Sponsored Ads".
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  1. Peter Marino from reelWebDesign.com, July 27, 2012 at 10:29 a.m.

    Does anyone know when Facebook will actually be executing sponsored results?

  2. Anthony Loredo from Basis Technologies, July 27, 2012 at 2:36 p.m.

    With Google showing how valuable sponsored ads are on top of search results (provided that the search was driven by a need to be productive and take an action), Facebook getting into this game could be lucrative. They already have scale, but the variable is whether or not people do searches on FB with the intention that they want to be productive on the site.
    www.horngroup.com/#blog/why-bet-on-itty-bitty-ad-spaces/

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