Facebook claims it is ‘absolutely core to marketing campaigns’
Facebook’s vice-president of global sales Mike Murphy has said that the site has more than quadrupled the number of its advertiser clients since the start of 2009. He has also described Facebook as having become “absolutely core to marketing campaigns”.
Murphy, speaking to Bloomberg, did not reveal actual figures, though he did say that Facebook has doubled the number of sales people over 2009 compared to 2008.
Murphy said: “We’re very well positioned as people come out of this current economic situation.”
The social networking site has offices dotted across the globe to handle international marketing campaigns, and global brands have been exploiting its extensive user base. Among those that have been attracted to the site are Adidas, Procter & Gamble, Sony Pictures and Honda to name but a few. Only last week, the Freedman blog reported Diet Coke’s new pan-European Facebook push, for its international ‘Love it Light’ campaign.
According to US advertising data supplied by comScore, the site ran 176 billion display ads in the first quarter of 2010 in the US alone, up from 70.7 billion in the previous year’s quarter.
It also grew its share of the US display market from 11% in the fourth quarter of 2009, to 16% in the first quarter of this year, putting it ahead of rival Yahoo, whose share fell from 13% to 12% in the same period.
Traffic to Facebook has also continued to grow, with a growing number of users viewing video content. According to comScore, the number of users viewing video on the site has been growing consistently over the past twelve months. The figure leapt from 36.6 million to 41.3 million in the two-month period from April 30.
If Facebook’s audience continues to grow at its current rate, it could end the year with the second greatest reach of all online video providers in the US, second only to YouTube owner Google. This is interesting news to brands – recently Sony Pictures for example ran a video ad to promote the release of its remake of ‘The Karate Kid’.
But while Facebook may be a viable player in online video marketing tools, it’s worth putting video viewing figures in the context of scale. On average, users viewed just 5.6 videos on Facebook during April, compared to an average of around 7.5 per user on Yahoo and Vevo, and a whopping 96 videos per user on Google properties. Long-form video site Hulu also attracted an average of over 24 views per user.
Tags: global marketing
