Marketing in the social media age

The Achilles heel of social networks has been making some coin from the massive communities. And one of the drawbacks has been the distrust by marketers in the internet.

Now Nielsen Company and Facebook have announced a multi-year, strategic alliance to help marketers better use the internet to develop and market new products.

No surprises that the first product off the ranks is Nielsen BrandLift, a market research tool that can measure the audience response to Facebook in just a few days. This will launch in the US with select test partners this week and roll out to all Facebook advertisers in the coming months.

The main method of gathering information will be opt-in polls on Facebook’s homepage to measure consumer attitudes and how intent they are on responding to the display advertising on Facebook.

“Facebook is an increasingly vital link between consumers and brands,” said John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen’s online division. “We will now be able to add deep knowledge of this important social network to our unmatched media measurement and consumer insight across all three screens. Together we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how web content and online advertising affect consumer behaviour.”

He says they have a unique ability to quickly and effectively poll a sample of more than 300 million users. “Nielsen’s expertise in data analysis will give marketers access to powerful data they can use to understand and improve current and future campaigns,” he says.

Nielsen plans on conducting hundreds of Nielsen BrandLift tests over the coming months.
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The share of estimated ad spend on the top social network and blogging sites has grown from a 7% share of total online ad spend in August 2008 to a 15% in August 2009, according to Neilsen. And Facebook has seen significant growth in advertising with a 14.7% share of display ad views in the US in August 2009, up from 1.8% in January 2009.

However, whether users of Facebook will respond to ads remains as a big question in marketer’s minds. Facebook’s CEO, Sheryl Sandberg told the a conference yesterday: “You want measurement, measurement you can rely on, measurement that you believe is valid. That’s why Facebook approached Neilseon as a respected third party.

She says that brands had found success on Facebook pages but adding paid ads through Engagement Ads will further enhance brand pages, she says.

The Engagement ads launched a year ago have been expanded to include easy ways for Facebook members to ask for free product samples.

Meanwhile arch rival Twitter still has no plans to put advertisements on the site this year. Co-founder Biz Stone says Twitter’s focus was on building out features ranging from an improved search functions to paid-for commercial accounts and potentially could include “light analytics” tools that allow commercial users to gather data on their followers.