Personalizing Social Advertisements Using Facebook

Nielsen and Facebook just released a study evaluating the impact of various types of social media ads on 800,000 participants.  While there was significant value generated from a basic page ad, the results suggest that a personalized ad (that indicates which friends like a particular product) increased brand awareness by 60% and moreover increased purchasing intent by 4x.

With the Facebook announcement today of the OpenGraph API, personalization is now easily available not only within Facebook, but across the web.  Based on Nielsen’s report, it is clear that if businesses want to get the most value for their advertising dollars, they should implement this personalization as soon as possible across all potential touch points and at various levels of the marketing funnel.  While it may mean providing more information to Facebook, it seems that the potential return on marketing dollars will be worth it.