The big promise of advertising on social networks has always been the ability to target members by their own self-proclaimed interests and demographics. Facebook has taken a small step in that direction, they now have what’s called Facebook Flyer ads. These are advertising widgets down the side bar. Facebook controls these, unlike the majority of the inventory on the site. Currently Microsoft deals with the existing inventory. In term of what revenue this generates to Facebook, I wouldn’t imagine a lot yet, but this is certainly a clever experiment worth keeping an eye on.

The flyers let you target by city, country, male, female, age range, political views, relationship status, workplace affiliation, education level, or keywords that are stated in individuals personal interest. I remember when I did an online advertising campaign to target delivery drivers for Pizza Hut, I used information from email accounts. The directly targeted message, to exactly the right demographic proved to be highly successful – here I was only able to know age, gender and address. All this other information Facebook is using is highly targeted and that last option (personal interests) is very powerful.

For instance, simply putting in different keywords into the Facebook Flyers ad-targeting page reveals that of the 19,951,900 Facebook members in the U.S., 101,000 are into rock climbing, 411,000 are into cooking, and 706,160 people are into travelling. Such targeting could theoretically allow advertisers to reach exactly the people they want, instead of the scatter-shot approach favoured today.

I’d certainly like to give it a go and measure response against ROI....