By: Dezmon Landers

Earlier this week Facebook announced a set of new advertising options for businesses. With many big corporations already signed up, are these new advertising platforms beneficial for startup companies? The first thing you have to consider is your target market. If you believe that you have an audience on Facebook, please continue reading.

The one product any business can use is the Facebook Pages. It is the equivalent of a facebook profile page for your business. Facebook is now a social network for businesses (convenient since it was already happening).

The first ad platform is Project Beacon. This is a user opt-in feature to receive messages to their mini-feed (on the profile) from your brand. For example, if you have a listing on eBay, you can publish it on your Facebook profile for all of your friends to see. This is being seen as a “referral” of that product or service because the Facebook member is using the service.

The larger question is do members want to see their friends referrals in the feeds? (lmage below)

The most interesting of the bunch is Social Ads. The Social Ads target members based on the information in their profiles such as stated interest, age, gender, work history and relationship status. Social Ads appear in both personalized ad banners and on members feeds. I would rank Social Ads somewhere between Google search ads and a banner ad on a website. You are not quite looking for it, but the product is related to your interest.

The most exciting from a marketers view is “Insights”. This tool will give you details on how people are taking about your brand, as you run your ads on Facebook. Insights will be the equivalent of analytics software to some degree. I have no idea how detailed it will be, but it is better than nothing. Insights will give you an idea if members are accepting your message or if it need to be tuned.

I’m not completely sold on the new ad platforms from a startup perspective. Pricing might turn into an issue as big business has already formed partnerships with Facebook. As Facebook opens the door to their members, ad executives on Madison Avenue say it will give Google a run for their money. Well, we will see about that.