A few weeks back, I wrote on Forrester’s Interactive Marketing blog about how European social marketers should choose a social network. To follow up on this idea, I wanted to point you to an interesting post I’ve found on TechCrunch, featuring a head-to-head comparison of the ROI one advertiser achieved using the self-service ad tools from Facebook and MySpace.
It was a relatively small test (the advertiser spent $3120 on Facebook and just $225 on Facebook), so I’d take the data with a grain of salt. And European advertisers should also remember that while Facebook offers its full targeting capabilities in Europe, MySpace has only rolled out a small fraction of their HyperTargeting solution here. But, with those caveats out of the way, the post itself and some of the comments offer interesting insight into small advertisers’ experiences with the two platforms.
Have you used either self-service platform? If so, what were your experiences like?
Nate: I did several small campaigns here in switzerland. The overall experiences was very good im comparison to adsense or adwords we almost doubled the traffic for the same money. But I think the “good old” times are over. You see here more and more “big” brands advertising on fb.
cheers moritz
Mortiz:
Thanks for your comment. Did you also use MySpace, or just Facebook? If you used them both, which performed better in terms of ROI, and which tool did you find most useful?
I’m also curious which big brands you’re seeing on Facebook in Switzerland. Here in Germany I don’t see any big brands on Facebook, just lots of lead generation advertising: ringtones, dating sites, credit cards, hotel booking, foreign exchange trading, etc. MySpace seems to be doing better with big brands here, including film studios, FMCG brands, and mobile phone operators. Which is no surprise, really: MySpace is relatively large in Germany (second only to StudiVZ, from what I can tell, and not as far behind StudiVZ as they once were), and has salespeople in the German market; by comparison Facebook is much smaller here and has no local staff.
Nate: I used only Facebook. I choose only Facebook because of the very selective parameters like age and gender for targeting. Sadly we cannot use the location feature (city would be very good, but switzerland is to small)
Brands: I mean “big for switzerland”. I didn saw many big international brands more local stuff. Like: political parties, fashion (stromberg, h&m and a lot online shops) newspapers… but the crap stuff which you describe disappears more and more!
Switzerland has only 7 mio habitants but 1 mio facebook accounts (almost as many as germany!)
Has StudiVZ hit break even? Do they make money?