Facebook recently unveiled a number of changes to its platform, featuring Timeline, along with numerous new advertising options. We understand the goal of these new advertising options is for Facebook to not only to make more money, but to increase their valuation prior to going public.

Image from Facebook's Guide to Premium on Facebook

Most of the new advertising options won’t apply to most businesses on Facebook due to minimum spending requirements (upwards of $25,000 per month), but we’re going to outline the new ad formats that users will start seeing, and that larger advertisers will begin considering in their ad mix.

Marketplace Ads

These are the Facebook ads many companies are familiar with. The format of these ads hasn’t changed. These self-serve ads are targeted to users based on the things they like, and are viewable on the right hand side of the Timeline. With the new ad options for big spenders, it may be more difficult to break through the clutter, as these ads only offer a simple image with a few lines of text.

New Premium Ads

Depending on the size of your brand (and budget), these additional options for advertising help take content and turn it into sponsored stories that are integrated with the newsfeed, ticker and timeline. The key here is quality over quantity, because the content is the ad. These require around a 25k/month minimum buy which is out of the question for many companies. Even the logout page is now for sale, as shown in the example above for Bing.

Offers

Advertise an offer on your page or promote it with an ad, and when people click to accept, the offer is emailed directly to them to redeem at a physical location. Offers are simple to understand and easy to redeem. These could become a threat to Groupon, because they are seamlessly integrated into the newsfeed. We may see these roll out for smaller advertisers in the future, but currently they’re only available to brands who qualify.

Reach Generator

Brands that qualify to turn this option on will ensure their message is pushed into the newsfeeds to 75% of their fans each month, with 50% guaranteed each week. While the details are still vague, you can expect this feature to cost small fortune, and yes, it is currently only available to qualifying brands.

Due to minimum spend requirements, small businesses seems to be shut out of many of the new Facebook advertising options, making it harder to gain visibility. This could see a shift for smaller business away from Facebook and its ads, perhaps opting to use other forms of online advertising like Google Adwords to drive traffic to Facebook pages.

We believe it will be a costly mistake for Facebook to shut out the large market of small businesses to appease the brands with bigger budgets. After all, collectively it was smaller businesses who helped build Facebook, with many big brands jumping onto the platform late.

It will be interesting to see how small businesses, and users will react to the influx of ad formats coming soon from larger brands. Will users feel their Facebook experience has become cluttered with spam? Or will the guidelines and best practices Facebook has set out for brands to follow create a better experience for all? Comment below and tell us what you think!

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