Facebook has announced that they will be testing real-time conversation mining to target ads with roughly 1 percent of their user base about six million people. While user preferences and likes in the past have helped deliver ads, mentioning pizza, a baby, buying a power drill or running can all now elicit immediate ads.
“The long-held promise of local is to deliver timely, relevant and measurable ads which drive actions such as commerce, so if Facebook is moving in this direction, it’s brilliant,” said Reggie Bradford, CEO of Facebook software and marketing company Vitrue. “This is a massive market shift everyone is pivoting toward, led by services such as Groupon. Facebook has the power of the graph of me and my friends placing them in the position to dominate this medium.”
This could make a huge difference in how ads on Facebook perform; the site had a 0.051 percent click-through rate in 2010, which was very low by industry standards. Still, this does not alter Facebook’s notoriously finicky ad algorithm used to determine whether there is any commercial intent behind a statement.
“You might have the potential of seeing some unfortunate ads if not targeted correctly,” said eMarketer social-media analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “If I’m talking generally about Starbucks — ‘my latte was cold’ — would it be weird to then see an ad from Peet’s ”
Source: Ad Age
