Facebook Ad Results - Gender Gap

"The Truth" Campaign is on. Captain and Captain has launched a Facebook campaign for its Lie Detector. A gadget that falls within their Gamer section one of the 5 characters in the shop (as the shop concept is "Shopping by personality type" - a fun experience).

The advertising campaign results, so far, show a blatantly higher curiosity rate in Female Facebook users, as they out-number their male counterparts in clicking on "Is he lying to you" vs "Is she lying to you" ads. A real gender gap! 

Difference in perception? Maybe. It turned out that merely changing the picture, which referred to a cartoon character, created an increase in the click through rate for men by a fair deal; but remained behind the female users.

 That said, the "win a lie detector" contest is on. All you have to do is fill in the form on The Truth page!

 Ok, so the Facebook applications' loading page time is murderous. What can we do? That's Lebanon today. Hoping it will be better tomorrow, I pledge support to the Ontornet campaign (too cute the website's design, do check it out if you haven't yet! - I SO should have blogged about this a long time ago.)

Facebook's Hidden Potential

Until this day, Facebook's main source of income is Facebook advertising. Of course, Facebook is not using mere banners, it has taken it to the next level.  

• From a client's perspective, Facebook has made advertising social. You get to see who in your network likes the ad. 
• From an advertiser's perspective, Facebook ads allow you to target your market really accurately; thus spend your Facebook ad budget more wisely. 

All in all, impressive isn't it?

So why am I driven to think that Facebook is still thinking inside the box?

Simple. Any website, no matter how ingeniously developed it is, would normally raise money, from advertising or some sort of e-commerce. Facebook is no ordinary website; and while creating its business model, they are mistaken to treat it as one. 

The wealth of Facebook is not the amount of users it has, or the number of visitors, time spent on the site, number of applications, user interactions... They all, sure, are worthy. Yet, they are not Facebook's most unique feature.

Facebook's real wealth is in the data it can provide. But you already knew that, right?

How could Facebook leverage on that? 

1. Facebook Insights - Facebook insights has the potential to grow bigger than any other web analytics tool. Let's face it, no other tool will be able to deliver as accurate visitor profiling as Facebook. What if they analyzed more than the Facebook likes and shares? Potential clients: any website owner. 
2. Marketing research - what wouldn't you give to know more about your customers? Potential clients: marketing research firms and individual companies. Population statistics- might be very useful for countries like Lebanon, with no recent or trustworthy official dats. Potential clients: governments, marketing research firms, or companies in a specific market
3. Other Types of Research - Doctoral programs- I am sure almost any research paper can benefit from data on Facebook Potential clients: universities and schools Correlations- Who knows, maybe at some point the data can be used to track down epidemics and discover the real causes behind cancer, by correlating cases, with Facebook user profiles. OK, so maybe I got a little bit carried away here... Potential clients: researchers, doctors

 How many more unexploited Facebook opportunities can you think of?

You might think I am on to them... But...

I hate hate hate politics... seriously!
However, I can't help but mention this. Israel's use of digital media is becoming dangerously ridiculous! Have a look at what appeared on my Facebook page today (July 19, 2010).

I mean... Seriously?

Keywords: Internet Marketing

" Internet marketing " are the words you have to type into Google to get both Google and Facebook online advertising messages under the adwords section.

Let's learn Search Engine Marketing (SEM) from the giants!

Keywords: Internet marketing

Global monthly searches: 2,740,000 (according to Google's Keyword Tool)

...and Google wins the bid! (their ad shows on top.)

What I thought was odd is actually Google's ad choice of language, although the words typed are in english, Google chose to show me the ad in French (?!)

I also find ridiculous that even Google has to rely on SEM, and were unable to rank in the first page through SEO in the organic search listings.

So we saw Facebook advertising in Google adwords. What's next? Google adwords advertised on Facebook?