Facebook Feature: Sponsored Groups

Most of the advertising social networking sites feature is banner ad based, or in special cases they let you take over the entire front page of MySpace.com, which has a starting price of over $75,000 to do.

Facebook.com recently announced the ability for advertisers to sponsor their own groups on the site. The groups are featured on the landing page of users when they log in, giving them the ability to join the group right from there. Advertisers can target market the group by gender, location, and age, which will allow them to narrow down the amount of people see the ad, which is how Facebook charges.

Sony Corporations Canadian Marketing team created a PlayStation Canada group, which according to Globeinvestor.com has over 27,345 members and is rapidly growing. So far slightly over 100 companies have paid for this service on Facebook, with Facebook expecting to be over 1000 sponsored groups in a short period of time.

Now most of the people reading this blog probably don’t have 100K to drop on an advertising campaign. But with a little effort and rational thought you can target market and create your own group on any of these social networking websites.

For example, if I wanted to create a Playstation Group on myspace, I would want to be able to find users with the same interests. MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Hi-5, and most social networking sites offer searchable groups. In cursory search of myspace, using their group search by title, I found a handful of Playstation groups with over 100K members. Using multiple profiles, I could invite these users to a group I created, it will take time but look at the benefits.

a) You don’t have to pay 100K, which is always nice :)
b) This search is even more targeted than the ad flashing on a page that is determined by age, region, or gender.

These people are all interested in video games, something the target ads can’t promise, but through your own hard work and doing some research you just found over 100K people to approach… With a specific interest in what you are selling.

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