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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

November, 2012

On Facebook, Brands and Reach

Discussion on Facebook's advertising and reach compared to other platforms.
I was going to write something in response to the post about Mark Cuban leaving Facebook for MySpace (he doesn't like that you have to pay to reach 100% of your audience), but Dalton Caldwell beat me to the punch with a well-put take:
We can expect to see Facebook deemphasizing traditional advertising units in favor of promoted news stories in your stream. The reason is that the very best advertising is content. Blurring the lines between advertising and content is one of the most ambitious goals a marketer could have.
Bringing earnings expectations into this, the key to Facebook “fixing” their mobile advertising problem is not to create a new ad-unit that performs better on mobile. Rather, it is for them to sell the placement of stories in the omnipresent single column newsfeed. If they are able to nail end-to-end promoted stories system, then their current monetization issues on mobile disappear.
The only thing I'd add to this (which I tweeted yesterday) is why would brands be treated differently than people on Facebook? If any of us post something to FB it will only reach a portion of our friends, so why should a brand be able to reach 100% of their fans? It's a filtered platform and that's what makes it different than Twitter and Tumblr.
November 14, 2012
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.