As Facebook continues to grow beyond a mere social network that connects individuals with other like-minded individuals, their focus looks to be more on increasing advertising revenue. To this end, Facebook is offering up many different options for advertisers. The most recent Facebook Sponsored Stories comes in the form of sponsored advertising making use of the Facebook search bar. This is an intriguing method of advertising where rival businesses can draw traffic from one another.
How this particular type of Facebook advertising works is that a business can purchase advertising space that is shown when a person does a search using the Facebook search tool. One of the examples is a rival game developer that has gaming apps on Facebook can have their advertising shown when somebody searches for one of their rival game developers applications.
How the Facebook Sponsored Stories Update Works
It’s important to understand, however, that this type of Marketing will not actually show up on the search results, but will show up in the typehead of the search tool. It’s also important to understand that there are certain limitations for this type of Facebook sponsored advertising.
The main restriction is that businesses looking to advertise in this manner will have to specify which Facebook business pages their advertising will appear on. This is not general advertising, so anyone looking to use this type of Facebook sponsored advertising will have to be very specific about where they want their marketing to show up.
In addition, this is a pay per click advertising campaign as well. Facebook also implies that the advertising found in the typehead of the search tool will be identical to the organic search results of the Facebook search result page.
Lastly, if a person clicks on the advertisement found in the search tool typehead, it must link them back to a page, an application, a news feed or something else existing on Facebook. These advertisements will be prohibited from linking people to outside webpages.
Of the many Facebook Sponsored Stories having to do with advertising, this one may be the boldest move yet by Facebook to increase advertising revenue and operating capital. Following models used by Google, Facebook is looking to generate more interest and business advertising by providing more tangible results to the businesses that will pay for this sort of marketing. This is one move of which there will likely to be many more in the future. Expanding Facebook’s reach from what was once primarily a social connection network to a fine tuned vehicle for business advertising and revenue creation.