Data centres to off-centre opinion

As an experiment, I created an add for my new weather site on Google, Microsoft and Facebook. I used an identical add on the three networks but different tagetting;

Microsoft Adcenter

UI is a bit confusing, the targetting is average (couldn’t find Woking, just Wokingham), the scheduling and budget settings are good.

Google Adwords

UI is better Adcenter but still cluttered and a bit confusing. The targetting is pretty good, allowing the user to target geographic location more accurately than MS (i.e. it found Woking). Adwords also gave you an indication of search volume when selecting keywords and also suggested additional keywords and estimated the #searches that used them per month – useful to expand your reach.

Facebook Advertising

UI is very straight forward and I found it clearer than either of the others. Unsurprisingly, the targetting is very very good, after all you share pretty much every bit of demographic info with Facebook. I targetting a 10 mile radius of Woking which Facebook claimed had an estimated reach of 95,440 people.

Cost Comparison (per click)

• MS ~£0.04
• Google ~£0.17
• Facebook ~£0.33

Impressions (two-day week end)

• MS: 40
• Google: 9,062
• Facebook: 99,233

Click Through Rate (CTR)

• MS: 2.5%
• Google: 0.07%
• Facebook: 0.021%

Traffic

Ironically, Yahoo and Ask both sent more traffic to the website than MS/Google or Facebook. Facebook was highest out of the three tested followed by DoubleClick (Google).

Conclusions

This wasnt a scientific test – the targetting was different on Facebook, which probably goes some way to explaining the low CTR as people were shown the ad based on location rather than a desire to find something about weather in Woking. The MS CTR was high, but with only 40 impressions I dont think you can make a fair comparison.

I’ll leave the ads running for a while then compare a longer period with more data.

I’m lucky enough to have received an invite to the beta of Threadsy. In their own words: threadsy is the world’s first integrated communications client! it combines your existing email, Facebook, and Twitter accounts into a unique, enjoyable experience.

Earlier this year I wrote a post asking for just such a thing, however now I’ve got it I’m faced with the question of trust. Do I trust Threadsy with my usernames and passwords for Twitter, Facebook, Live Mail etc? How do I know Threadsy is legitimate & secure? The answer is I don’t. I have to make up my own mind based on their privacy policy and reputation. The one thing they have going for them is the fact they were featured on Cnet – a site I do trust. In other words, trust by association, which is just like life: you build trust through recommendation/association and experience.

Its impossible to avoid the massive growth of social networking sites on the internet, but what is it all about?

I remember my ex-boss Arvindra Sehmi asking me what my Facebook ID was in the middle of 2006, at the time my response was something along the lines of I’m not a teenager so why would I have an account? This reflected my perception at the time but I went ahead and signed up for an account anyway, you gotta keep the boss happy don’t you?

Stephanie already had numerous accounts on social networking sites such as Beebo and MySpace and all she did was seemingly write short messages to friends. I simply didn’t get the point, especially considering all her friends had MSN Messenger.

Having signed up for a Facebook account, I realised it had a very different demographic – more mature and plenty of professionals compared to the teenagers who dominate MySpace and Beebo. The audience felt more like LinkedIn than MySpace.

I’ve never been a social butterfly, preferring to have a few good friends than a ton of “people who I’ve met”, however my social network in Facebook is far broader than my physical network. Or maybe thats just because Facebook shows you a list of “friends” whereas I’d only list a few people I count as friends when asked.

So, what does Facebook (or other social networking sites) actually do? This gets us to the point of this post (finally, you might say): simply put, it lets you find people and share information/pictures/thoughts/plans. For example, I worked at Glastonbury a few weeks back, a friend of Robs took a ton of photos and then posted them to Facebook – he also tagged the people in the photos, so Facebook helpfully emailed me to tell me I was in some new photos. I can then go to these photos and comment on them or even tag more people in them. The real clever thing about Facebook is the ability for new applications to be added by anyone. For example, there is an application called Cities I’ve Visited which presents you with a map upon which you can place pins recording the cities you’ve visited for all your friends to see. Another application lets you send a greeting card to people e.g. for their birthday or Christmas. Each time you add an application, you can invite your friends to use the application too.

LinkedIn is a different kind of social network: its aimed at building and maintaining a purely professional network, often to find a new job.

You can find me on Facebook and LinkedIn, but you’ll have to sign up for a free account to see my full profile: I don’t want any Tom, Dick or Harry sneding me messages or adding me to their friends list do I?