Live from fMC: Facebook Courts Big Brands, Positions Itself to Secure Share of TV Spend

Facebook’s much anticipated and first ever Facebook Marketing Conference, fMC, kicked off at 1PM this afternoon in New York City. We were excited to have been invited to the event, and take a first look at new Facebook products aimed at courting large businesses looking for an online media channel with the scale currently offered by television. With 845 million users across the globe who are spending an increasingly larger portion of their time on the social network, Facebook certainly fits the bill.

The Keynote: Facebook’s Impact on Society, through Storytelling.

The keynote began with Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg eloquently outlining the internet’s impact on society, and Facebook’s role in introducing a platform where individuals are connected to other people and entities — ultimately providing them a voice on the web.

“When the internet happened, it changed our lives. It changed our lives around the provision of information,” she shared. “Technology is powering us; it’s powering who we are. This is a shift – a shift to the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends. … History is filled with examples of when individuals had a voice and made a difference. The difference now is that people can have this voice at scale.”

She set this stage to then outline how the Facebook platform is helping marketers forge deeper connections with individuals.

The State of Facebook Marketing in Infographics

Facebook ads are here, and they’re here to stay. Over the past few months there has been an influx of new, fantastic infographics on Facebook and its emergence as one of the preeminent online engagement and marketing platforms. We decided to share some of our favorites, organized by the current state of Facebook trends, understanding your followers and fans, maximizing the potential of your Facebook marketing campaign, and the future of the Open Graph platform and Social Sharing.

Courtesy of The Social Marketer:
Facebook emerges as the largest ad impressions publisher on the internet

Facebook, once thought of as the future of online advertisements, has become the dominant force in a crowded field of online ad publishers.

Nanigans on the Speaking Circuit: Cornell, Social Media Week NYC & More

Recently the team at Nanigans has been on a bit of a speaking circuit, on topics ranging from Facebook advertising and social commerce to more general startup marketing. Here’s a recap:

Cornell University

Our SVP Product, Rishi Dean, made a guest appearance as professor of digital marketing at Cornell University. As part of his invitation to speak at Cornell, Rishi was asked to create and propose a business case for students to complete. While the full text of that case isn’t publicly available, below are the presentation slides Rishi used to take students through the evolution of online advertising and how the rise of social networking is transforming the space.

Insider’s Guide to Facebook Advertising: Country Targeting — Reach vs. CPC [Infographic]

Part of Facebook’s draw in being such a transformational media platform for advertisers lies in its global connectivity. 75 percent of Facebook’s 845 million active users live outside the United States, with the social network supporting 70 different languages.

With this global user base and a real-time ad marketplace, many marketers face a dilemma in balancing country reach (the number of targetable users in that country) and cost goals when bidding for ad placement on Facebook. We pulled data from the 175 billion Facebook ad impressions managed through our Ad Engine  in 2011 to compare the reach and average cost-per-clicks (CPC) for countries across the globe — featured today on Business Insider:

The State of Social Marketing 2011 – 2012

Pivot Conference recently released a report on the state of social marketing, noting that board rooms are finally tipping their hats to the value driven by social networking and, consequently, are putting more budget behind it.

The results in the report are based on a survey conducted by Pivot with 181 brand managers, agency professionals and marketing experts. Half of the questions asked these marketers to define their (or their clients’) “social consumers,” and the remainder focused on the extent to which social marketing is being leveraged by their business. Here are some of the results we found most interesting:

The Social Consumer

Social consumers are defined as those who turn to their social networks to learn about products and services. They are undoubtedly some of the types of people you should consider targeting when advertising. So, who are they? Overall, they tend to be gender neutral, have higher incomes, be middle aged, and frequent Facebook by far and large more than any other social network.

Social Marketing Goes Mainstream, Budgets Increase

Today eMarketer published an article highlighting how top brand marketers are looking to invest “big” in social media in the coming years. The article was based on a survey conducted this summer by consultancy Booz & Co. and Page management software Buddy Media.

Just how “big” are Fortune 100 companies across the globe investing in social? Two-thirds report that social media made up less than 5% of their total digital spend in 2011. In three years, a third expect that number to rise to up to 10% of budgets, 27% predict it rising to 10-20% of their budgets, and an additional 28% report it will make up more than 20% of their budgets. These companies plan to spend that increased budget on hiring employees (57%), leveraging technology vendors (48%), and investing in more social media buys (38%).

The results are no surprise if you follow Facebook news closely. In the last couple of weeks a plethora of surveys and articles have been published speaking to both how much more users are engaging on the social network — and how marketers are following that engagement with spend: