Facebook launched a paid advertising platform called Flyers. There are two options, Basic and Pro. Basics gets you 5000 views for $10 ($0.002 CPM, if we regard views as impressions), and Pro lets you determine CPC in a similar way you would determine price-per-click on other paid advertising networks (max CPC for ranking and max daily budget for spending control).

A flyer is basically an image enabled listing which will be shown in the left column of a user’s profile below quick search and links. There is a 25 character limit for the title, and a 200 character limit for the flyer text. That’s it about flyer creation. The second step is to specify the demographics for the intended audience (people that the flyer will be shown to). You can specify age, sex, location, keywords of interest, political views (!), relationship status, education status, and workplace (which is a text field which kind of confuses me as there’s no instructions for filling in). That’s it for flyer targeting, now onto expenses. You can set maximum CPC (min $0.01), maximum daily budget (min $1), duration (continuous or date scheduled).

In the Basic version, the main difference from the Pro version is in the targeting (only basic parameters) and pricing (days running).

This system definitely gives the advertiser a direct channel towards Facebook users. This may be an alternative approach to Facebook app creation. My feeling is that flyers would be most successful if coupled with Facebook apps (FB app promotion and/or complementary promotion - combined FB app and PPC product or service promotion). While Facebook definitely has a large user base (now more than 40 million users), it may be uncertain how the FB user community will react towards flyers. One can expect good results since flyers will be highly targeted and shown within user groups that are topic specific, but social networks have a tendency to surprise advertisers unless advertising is approached in a specific manner.

Will you be using Facebook Flyers as part of your advertising efforts?

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