Facebook, Brands, No More Unpaid Ads

Facebook Will Curtail Unpaid Ads by Brands - NYTimes.com: "... Facebook recently shocked investors by saying that it planned to spend billions of dollars on projects that might never generate any profits. And on Friday, the company told marketers that if they wanted to reach customers on Facebook, they needed to buy an ad... Marketers have little choice but to play along. Facebook has accumulated one of the biggest vaults of consumer data in the world. It dominates social media advertising the way Google dominates search ads, and analysts say that brands will keep flocking to the service. “Facebook is saying, ‘We’re in charge. You’re renting from us,’ ” said Debra Aho Williamson, a social media analyst at the research firm eMarketer. "But businesses continue to spend more money on advertising on Facebook, and users continue to spend more time and share more information on it.” The change to the news feed is the latest blow to businesses that try to reach customers through their Facebook pages. So many posts, videos and images are being published on Facebook that the average user has about 1,500 new items they could see when they log on. Some people have as many as 15,000, the company says. Over the last two years, the social network has repeatedly tweaked the system to show the top 300 or so items that it predicts each person will want to read. Facebook argues that people prefer to see videos, photos, news articles and updates from their friends and family more than from brands... Still, while some advertisers may now focus more on other social platforms that do not rank their content, such as Twitter, no one can afford to ignore Facebook. “They are sitting on such a wealth of data to be able to target effectively,” he said. “They have dominance in the kind of products they are offering the market.” (read more at link above)
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