Facebook Flyer test results
I was preparing for my Graphing Social Patterns speech on Facebook marketing last night and decided to try out Facebook Flyers, which allows members to create their own little display ads that shows up in the left navigation bar.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has spent 2007 quietly assembling a self-serve marketing toolkit: Facebook Polls launched in June as a market-research product, and Flyers lets members buy their own small display ads in the left navigation bar with no sales rep involved. The timing matters because a Reach Students report in July found Facebook advertising bringing poor results, leaving advertisers unsure whether the platform's inventory converts at all.
Groundswell's author ran actual Flyer campaigns and published the numbers ahead of a Graphing Social Patterns talk on Facebook marketing — turning an anecdotal test into one of the few public data points on what member-created ads cost and deliver. The conference pickup by CenterNetworks, Epicenter and Between the Lines shows how hungry the marketer community was for hard performance data.
First-order effects
- Marketers gain a low-cost way to buy Facebook display inventory directly, and Groundswell's published test gives early adopters real cost/response benchmarks instead of guesswork.
Second-order effects
- With July's poor-results report still fresh, any weak Flyer numbers sharpen advertiser skepticism about Facebook's ad effectiveness, pressuring Facebook to prove its inventory performs before brands commit larger budgets.
Third-order effects
- If Polls-and-Flyers-style self-serve tools keep maturing, Facebook's path runs toward a fully automated ad platform where any member or business buys targeted reach without a sales relationship — the structure that would let its user database become an advertising business at scale.
The trend: Facebook is iterating from experimental self-serve tools like Polls and Flyers toward a scalable automated advertising business built on its member data.