Aug 20, 2008 2:38 PM

Facebook's New Social Ads Turn Your Friends Into Marketers

With a new social approach to advertising, Facebook hopes to present marketers with unique and coveted advertising opportunities, but there’s a real risk that Facebook users, who already pretty much ignore ads, will not take kindly to passively shilling with their feeds. Undeterred by the setbacks with its Beacon platform last year, Facebook is rolling […]

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With a new social approach to advertising, Facebook hopes to present marketers with unique and coveted advertising opportunities, but there's a real risk that Facebook users, who already pretty much ignore ads, will not take kindly to passively shilling with their feeds.

Undeterred by the setbacks with its Beacon platform last year, Facebook is rolling out more advertising that uses your friends to sell you stuff.

In an interview with AllFacebook Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, outlines some of the new social ad schemes Facebook will be rolling out. Currently, Facebook users are shown ads specific to their interests and profile data. But in the next 6 to 12 months:

“Marketers will be able to pay to accelerate usage they find valuable, to dial up and down actions that people take on applications, as part of the Social Ads program. For instance, News Feed uses an algorithm to communicate a users actions to the friends who would find it most interesting. Marketers will be able to pay for increased or enhanced distribution above and beyond what News Feed already provides.”

What does that mean? If you get a newsfeed from someone you haven’t spoken to in years who “totally loved Dark Knight!” it’s probably because Warner Bros. paid to have it broadcast to you.

Normally, information that you put on Facebook is sent to the people in your network who would find it the most valuable. But the algorithm that Facebook has implemented to determine your closest friends can easily be translated into a marketing tool, with Facebook charging advertisers to get your positive messages about their products sent to as many people as they would like.

Facebook’s strategy is based upon the premise that people come to the site to see what their friends are doing and what they like. By having products presented as endorsements rather than commercial buys, they hope advertisers will reap a positive benefit.

“That is advertising,” Kendall told Wired.com last week. “But it doesn’t look like that to your friends, because they care about you.”

How much they care about you and your opinions may decline quickly, however, if you keep posting product endorsements to your status that they have to sift through every day.

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