• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, March 6, 2012

In the wake of Facebook rolling out a new ad tools for marketers, Nielsen released data Tuesday showing social ads deliver 55% higher recall than ads that don’t allow people to share ad content with friends.

The finding is drawn from an analysis of 79 Facebook campaigns over six months to see how well ads with social messages succeeded in breaking through to the audience. It defines social ads as those served to users who have friends that are fans of, or have interacted with, the advertised brand and highlight the relationship, while non-social ads are served to the remainder of the Facebook population.

A prior Nielsen survey found 76% of U.S. Internet consumers said they most trusted recommendations from personal acquaintances, while 49% trusted consumer opinions posted online. “Thus, it should come as no surprise that ads that reference a consumer’s friends prove more memorable than traditional ads with no social content,” stated a Nielson blog post Tuesday.

The online measurement firm has a formal partnership with Facebook to provide insights on how ads perform on the social network. A separate recent study by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based marketing think tank, however, found only about 1%of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging with the brands.

That finding was based on an analysis of Facebook’s own People Talking About This PTAT) metric, which spans tracking of likes, posts, comments, tags and other means of interaction with brand pages. Less than half of 1% of all brand fans on Facebook create any content around them, according to the study.