We’ve been tracking goings-on in the social media advertising space for some time, and as such have also been tracking the growth of audience at large sites like Facebook. Facebook’s audience growth numbers are quite impressive, and as predicted, much of their US growth has come from the older adult audience. Growth since we measured things on 2/28/08 among users aged 13 to 23 has been just 33% (just!), which is minor compared to the growth rates in other areas:

While this larger audience creates increased targeting opportunities for marketers, and there have been some improvements in the Facebook advertising system (including a quality mechanism that turns off underperforming ads more quickly), the ad system still very much lags behind the innovation present in many other areas of the Facebook platform. The obvious consumer-side issue is that most of the ads are not that relevant. This is understandable – all social networks face this issue, in that the typical keywords on users’ profiles are diverse, center around interests, and mostly not that good for targeting. At LinkedIn, we were able to do a lot better than the average social network, with Google Adsense to generate valuable ads since the average user’s profile has higher-value keywords that can be used for targeting. So as a result, people target the kinds of things that ARE available, which is why when I saw this comment “I can’t wait to get married so I stop getting facebook ads for wedding planning” I laughed.

Facebook was under the impression initially that its ad platform would be used by brand marketers. An early set of guidelines banned companies from advertising there if they had a form that was gathering data as the landing page – the typical practice amongst most lead generation companies. The platform recently has seen a lot of use by direct marketers, with a variety of offers from skincare to quizzes (very popular) to car insurance; and yet Facebook offers middling reporting and no conversion tracking or other kinds of services to assist these types of marketers. Hopefully these things will change. I think that Facebook as an ad platform has a lot of promise and we are going to continue to use it for some of our clients, mostly in testing mode right now. One thing we have also gleaned from our experiments is that the text/graphical hybrid ads sold via self-service are certainly out-performing the banner ads on the Facebook system.

Herewith, our data on the growth rates by age group for the US audience, all taken from the Facebook ad system. 137 percent growth in a year and a quarter is not bad at all! Data at this link.