I have also had good results in promoting a pool table company on MySpace through networking with groups etc. It is sometimes more difficult for an “agency” to maintain the groups / profiles etc, because it is a SOCIAL network and that requires the involvement of the clients, or a specific community manager. This is especially true for small businesses because there is often not enough money to have a community relations person to continue growing the profiles and pages.

As a result, I am very excited about the potential for Facebook …

We have a client who makes arcade-style joysticks for xbox 360 and PS3 that is doing advertising there. The reality of Facebook advertising is that it is great for reaching specific individuals, but it is hard to make them do an action. This is in part to the fact that the ads are so small and in a not very visible place. These are issues you can overcome through connecting it to social actions, designing better copy, and improving the image etc. of course.

We’ll keep it as part of the overall strategy, but it might be more effective as a tool to get people to join a group or other social action on Facebook, than to buy a product. Display ads worked better on a per-click-cost because of this. Like I said, it is part of our overall branding strategy … so that when they see a review or are looking for something in the future they hopefully think of the client first.

My feeling as to why Facebook works like this is that FB people are relatively sophisticated and because they tend to be older, and better educated than other Internet media, they have a limited amount of time to spend - so they are more focused on FB stuff rather than just browsing the web type activities.