In spite of all the excitement around the news, there have been some questions regarding the impact of the IPO on users and marketers. Without users, Facebook would not have turned into what it is today, and without marketers, the business value of the platform would not exist. But, does the IPO change this?

According to Chris Treadaway, the founder of Polygraph Media as well as the author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day, Facebook will still have to please its users and marketers but will have the additional strain of maintaining profitability. He says it will face a scrutiny that it’s never been subjected to before.

“Users will be affected because Facebook will be trying to do everything they can to increase revenues, increase profits, while kind of gradually, incrementally making the user experience a little more… advanced with every passing day,” Treadaway pointed out.

Facebook faces a tough battle because, on one hand, public markets will demand to know what its plans are, how it will monetize personal data, and what its financials are. On the other side, users may counterattack the company if it feels Facebook is using too much of their personal data to make money.

Although users often complain about the power of Facebook, Treadaway tells us that he doesn’t think they will be too quick to abandon the service that has brought so many people together, and essentially, kept the world connected.

“For the last 15 years, we’ve been gradually giving the Internet broadly a lot more of our personal information, and, over time, we’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with what we’ve done,” he said.

“There are just too many benefits of using Facebook currently… for people to just stop doing it altogether, or be, all of a sudden, so concerned about it that it causes people to use it different ways.”

On the marketing side, we know that Facebook provides a great opportunity for brands to connect and sell to consumers, which, in turn, creates revenue for both the brands and Facebook. In fact, the filing showed that 83 percent of Facebook’s revenue in 2011 came from advertising.

“Even though click through rates and impression-based costs have increased a little bit over the last few years… there’s still a ton of room for that to grow,” said Treadaway.

“If you combine Facebook’s targeting options with the price that people pay at least on an impression basis currently, there’s really no better deal out there on the Internet… and there wouldn’t be even if Facebook increased their rates 3 or 4-fold over time,” he added.

But since there will be a stronger pressure on Facebook to bring in revenue, questions are being raised about how the company will ramp up its ad platform. Some are speculating that a new behavioral ad targeting system called “Open Graph action spec targeting” could be the answer.

In a nutshell, these “action specs” are verbs that Facebook collects from the statuses that users provide. Users constantly let Facebook know what they are “watching”, “playing”, “purchasing,” “eating”, and “drinking.” The idea is that Facebook would take these actions and generate leads for brands.

Treadaway tells us that he believes Facebook will play a more active role between consumers and brands selling goods going forward. He also said tools that help marketers do this would likely be available sometime over the next year.

How do you see Facebook’s IPO impacting users and marketers? Let us know.

"Targeting full HTML mobile devices is appealing to advertisers for many reasons," says Raj Kapoor of the Microsoft Mobile Advertising team. "Some advertisers wish to reach this audience segment simply due to their increased consumption of mobile media products. Other advertisers wish to use full HTML targeting to target Rich Media ad campaigns to devices that support these advanced mobile ad units, or simply to drive consumers to a more engaging full HTML page designed for mobile screens."

"Still other advertisers wish to enter the mobile advertising space but have not yet optimized their website to render on feature phones or other less featured mobile browsers," he adds. "While these advertisers recognize that the ideal consumer experience is to create a dedicated mobile web site for all mobile users, including those with devices capable of displaying sites originally created for the PC web, full HTML device targeting allows them to easily extend their online campaigns into mobile and reach this engaged mobile audience by driving these sophisticated users to their online destinations."

In the past, as Kapoor explains, advertisers had to keep an up-to-date list of every mobile device with a full HTML mobile browser, and individually target each one. The new feature should drastically reduce the headache associated with that.

The list of such devices continues to grow rapidly, particularly as smartphone usage becomes more and more broad. It is important to advertisers that they reach as many devices as possible if they’re campaign is not targeted at users of just one of them.
 

Related Articles:

> Google Narrows Down Mobile Ad Targeting

> Opera Scoops Up Mobile Advertising Firm AdMarvel

> Google Buys Mobile Ad Firm For $750 Million In Stock

When a user goes to create an ad on Facebook, they begin the process by designing the ad. Here they select the landing page, the ad copy, and an optional image. Then they are presented with the targeting section, which now features the keyword suggestions.

The feature was noticed by All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill, who stumbled upon it while testing features of the Facebook advertising system. "While it may not appear to be a big deal, this feature could help significantly increase revenue as each advertisement ends up with a broader reach," says O’Neill.

That’s a good point. It could be not only be good for advertisers, but Facebook as well. It could give Facebook advertising more weight and get more advertisers on board as a result. Add that to a possible web-wide Facebook payment platform, and Facebook might be able to make some good money.

The keywords are based on information users list in their profiles like activities, favorite books, tv shows, movies, etc. It can be hard to know what people are listing, so the suggestions could be quite useful.

"The increasing availability of electronic communication data, such as that arising from email exchange, presents social and information scientists with new possibilities for characterizing individual behavior and, by extension, identifying latent structure in human populations," says the abstract for the report.

Technology Review simplifies what is found in the rather complex report:

Small worlds expert Duncan Watts at Yahoo Research in New York City and a few pals studied the time of day at which around 3000 individuals at a European university sent emails over an 83-day period as well as the email habits of over 122,000 e-mailers at a US university over a 2-year period.

They found two distinct types of emailer. They termed the first "day labourers" because they tended to send emails throughout the normal working day between 0900 and 1800 but not at other times. The second group they called "emailaholics" because these people sent emails throughout the waking hours from 0900 to 0100.

It will be interesting to see if Yahoo incorporates such demographics into the targeting of their own marketing offerings. Marketers will always be salivating over new ways to break down potential audiences for more relevant targeting.

The only way to open new opportunities in this regard is through extensive research, and it looks like that is what Yahoo is doing. You can take a look at the full report here (pdf).

"It’s true that online media has been nearly overwhelmed by an onslaught of inventory — there’s something like 80% more online ad space, a lot of it from social media, than there was a couple years ago," says Forrester Analyst David Card.

This makes targeting all the more important. Luckily there are still channels that can accomplish some very niche targeting, and other channels that have not had this as a strong point in the past are starting to cater to it on a higher level.

"But for all the macroeconomic forces of ‘infinite inventory,’ some ad space — and some audiences — are worth way more than others," says Card.

Research recently shared by comScore shows that vertical ad networks – those that target ads to specific online audiences based on demographic or category content (not unlike our own iEntry Network) – are increasing their reach.

Of those networks tracked by the research firm, the collective reach has increased from 21.5% of the total US Internet audience to 57.1% in a year’s time from March ’08 to March ’09.

Audiences for these vertical ad networks are becoming increasingly more engaged according to comScore. "As more vertical ad networks prove their ability to effectively reach specific target audiences by aggregating mid-tail publisher sites, the industry will likely give greater consideration to these emerging ad delivery channels," says the firm’s VP Media, Lesle Litton. More on comScore’s findings can be viewed here.

Card offers some advice for publishers who are looking to keep advertisers coming. "Cut clutter, experiment with new formats, and know your audience really, really well, is the easy advice for online publishers," he says. "Build out a marketing platform that’s flexible in terms of targeting and in incorporating data from many sources. Encourage comparison. Add other sites’ inventory to your own. Pit your salesforce against multiple ad networks to see who can best monetize some sections of your site (but hold back the best stuff.)," he says.

It’s worth giving heavy consideration to how valuable your home page is as well. While AOL-like numbers are certainly not going to be incredibly common, Compete looked at just how much traffic a home page banner ad displayed on AOL’s home page gave to the advertiser in comparison with other sources. Long story short, that advertiser was probably quite pleased.

"Many of you have told us you would like to target users by the primary language they speak. Now you can," says a post on Facebook’s blog. "For instance if you would like to target Spanish speaking users in the United States, simply type in ‘spanish’ into the targeting box labeled: Languages. If no other targeting filters are chosen, you’ll see there are over 1 million people who match your ‘Spanish speakers in the U.S.’ target audience."

The other new feature, radius targeting, allows advertisers to target consumers based on a certain mile radius of the target location. At this point, it’s available for city targeting within the US, the UK, and Canada within 10, 25, and 50 miles of the selected cities.

The addition of such features will only help to increase Facebook’s role in the online advertising world. As I discussed yesterday, the gap between Facebook and Google is getting narrower in terms of unique visitors. Advertising with Facebook is only going to become more appealing as this trend continues.

Advertising with Microsoft might also increase due to the company’s partnership with Facebook. With real-time search demand on the rise, and Facebook’s new feeds rolling out, Facebook searching is probably going to be happening a lot more frequently.

- Targeted reach – you can narrow your campaign to a specific audience of MySpace users, including gender, age range or geographic area based on the info that users provide on their profiles.

– Ease of use – You can get your campaign online in just a few simple steps using tools provided by MySpace.

– Spending Control – You can determine how much you want to spend on a campaign, anywhere between $25 and $10,000. You’re only charged when users click on your ads (CPC rates start at $0.25).

– Measurable Performance – you can track the performance of your ads and edit them, as well as adjust your spending.

The service initially seemed targeted toward musicians, as it surfaced near the launch of MySpace Music, and seemed a perfect way for bands to promote themselves even further with MySpace. While this is still true, MySpace has stressed that the service is really for everybody including "filmmakers, musicians, politicians, authors, video bloggers, non-profit orgs, realtors, restauranters, comedians, radio stations, and doctors," according to Mashable’s  Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, and backing up my suggestion for small businesses to take advantage of the program.

MyAds is similar to Facebook’s advertising offering, but Facebook only offers text ads whereas MySpace offers display ads only. Are these the answers the social network "big boys" have been looking for? Michael Arrington at TechCrunch writes:

The big social networks are still trying to find their “Google Moment” – the point when (and if) they find a way to monetize these massive audiences they’ve attracted. Google was just a great search engine until they matched it with contextual advertising. MySpace and Facebook need to find their own revenue engine.

Facebook will probably only generate $300 million or so in revenue this year. MySpace is ahead of them, with $850 million or so in revenue last year and a projected $1 billion in fiscal 2008 (which ends next June for them). But it’s still a far cry from what Google generates per unique monthly visitor.

I’m not going to say it’s the next AdSense, but I think MyAds will be pretty big for MySpace, and even bigger for its users. The ease-of-use that will allow "Joe MySpace-User" to design their own ads and target them at cheap rates is going to appeal to a whole lot of people, particularly those who have had trouble getting Social Media Marketing to work for them.

The recent launch of MySpace Music should only help the social network grow as well, and that means potential target audiences for ads will grow right along with it, and with the sheer catalog MySpace Music offers, there will be no genre left out, leaving plenty of room for every demographic as long as they like music in any form. Let’s just hope advertisers can avoid the kind of insulting ads that Facebook members have been seeing based on that network’s ad personalization capabilities.

As we reported last month, ISPs are sitting on a wealth of personalized data, but lawmakers have expressed concerns over the methods used to tap into that data–especially "deep packet inspection."

The pressure has obviously become too much for Charter which, conveniently, spins the suspension of its ad plans into a mere pause, while it listens to customers.

"As we do with all new service launches or initiatives, we conducted focus groups well in advance, which told us that most broadband consumers would look upon this service favorably," Charter said on Wednesday.

"However, some of our customers have presented questions about this service as well as suggested improvements," it said. "We will continue to take a thoughtful, deliberate approach with the goal to ultimately structure an advertising service that enhances the Internet experience for our customers and addresses questions and concern they’ve raised."

Translated: We thought we could make a lot of money off of this, but it turns out our customers would rather we didn’t spy on them.

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