A while back I wrote about the new Facebook Ads platform and how I thought it was just fluff so that the company could claim that it had some income stream in order to raise more money from the big fish like Microsoft. After working with it since then, I have not yet been able to post a successful affiliate advertisement on the site.

Whenever I create a new ad, I end up with this message saying my ad was not approved:

• This ad has been disabled and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Service and Advertising Guidelines if you have further questions.

I love the part where it says “Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations”. What this means to me is “We’re sorry, we don’t really have anyone looking at your ad but our algorithm didn’t like it for some reason. We really don’t know. Try again though, kthx!” If Facebook is serious about it’s super duper ad platform, I think it should want money from affiliates. The law of large numbers says that a little money * a lot of affiliates = a lot of money for FB.

So, Facebook, get your act together and make an advertising system that works, will ya? I’m trying to give you money but you won’t take it! What kind of business is that?

I’m not a heavy user of any one particular social networking software but I have tried just about all of major ones at one point or another. I still use Orkut to keep in touch with my friends and family in Brasil, but I rarely log in to really do much with the sites. I did enjoy Facebook and MySpace for a while, but then it got boring. I still use the sites once in a while but mostly to look for business opportunities and to see if I can make money off of those sites somehow.

I was pretty excited when Facebook started letting people post ads on their site and was especially perky when they launched their Facebook Ads platform. With millions of users at your fingertips, mostly young people with spending money, Facebook seemed like the perfect place to place ads online. It was with a little shock and some surprise that after creating an advertising campaign I received very little clicks and my account was suddenly canceled, with no explanation.

All bias aside, I’ve come up with a short list of the Pros and Cons of Facebook Advertising.

The Pros Facebook Ads:

• Huge userbase
• Users are at the right age for splurging
• Users can be easily swayed to click on your ad
• Easy to target the “party” mentality
• Choice of CPC or CPM
• Easy to use interface
• Easy to create a nice ad with long description and images

The Cons of Facebook Ads:

• The users are smarter than advertisers think
• Users haven’t clicked on my ads as much as they do on Google
• Traffic is not very targetted
• Users on Facebook don’t pay attention to the ads
• Return on investment is minimized

I think that FB ads are a nice way to add to your advertising portfolio, but I won’t rely on its efficacy to make money. I’ll still use Google primarily and, if my account is ever reinstated, may try FB again. I don’t think the users on FB really click on the ads all that much, but depending on the cleverness of the advertiser, I could be wrong.