This is a guest post by Resolution Media Director of Client Strategy and Development George Manas.

Marketers seeking better ways to reduce waste, influence buying behavior and strengthen brand equity are likely to embrace Facebook Partner Categories. Launched on April 10, this new self-service capability puts a rich array of data-driven targeting segments at advertisers’ fingertips, helping increase the precision, relevance and effectiveness of their Facebook campaigns.

Partner Categories uniquely combines data describing both the online and offline purchasing behavior of consumers in more than 500 segments and relies on data from third-party firms Datalogix, Acxiom and Epsilon. Marketers of all sizes can benefit from Partner Categories’ easy access and no-minimum-spend requirement.

The new service is the latest in a series of targeting enhancements introduced by Facebook to improve advertisers’ results. Partner Categories likely will attract as many or more advertisers as has Facebook’s recently launched Custom Audiences program, which provides the ability to import customer data to improve targeting.

Partner Categories integrates with other targeting options within Power Editor (Facebook’s advanced self-serve platform) and is available through select paid media APIs. U.S.-based advertisers can begin using Partner Categories immediately, while advertisers based in other countries must be white-listed to use the service and may only target U.S. consumers at this time.

Although we see almost daily examples of new technology empowering the consumer’s evolution, it’s important to also acknowledge the vital impact of new advertiser services like Partner Categories, which keep marketers ahead of the curve.
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This is a guest post by Mario Zelaya, Managing Director at Majestic Media, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer & digital marketing agency, specializing in custom apps and promotions for web and mobile.

Marketers are starting to focus more on social media efforts, realizing that it’s an important piece of the marketing puzzle. They’ve started to use social media, but only as an extension of a traditional campaign or as a small marketing initiative on the side. Many of them are hesitant to rely too heavily on social media. They’re willing to let social media ride in the car, but they’re reluctant to give them the keys.

According to a report released by Social Media Examiner at the end of 2012, 83 percent of marketers have said that social media was important to their business. However, the CMO survey released in February found that marketers are only allocating 8.4% of their budget for social media.

Many believe that in order for a campaign to succeed, it always needs to be integrated across different channels. This is simply not the case. At Majestic Media, we’ve seen time and time again that a fully digital campaign, or even a fully social campaign, can reach hundreds of thousands of consumers, achieving millions of social impressions and engagement, and generate a tremendous amount of traffic.
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This is a guest post from Jed Singer, director of client engagement at Stuzo, a creative technology company and Preferred Marketing Developer with Pages and Apps badges.

The Facebook News Feed is becoming evermore critical to engagement on Facebook. When you design branded social solutions, they need to serve as conduits for storytelling. 100x more people are likely to see the stories that your social product or campaign pushes out than will ever actually experience the product or campaign.

This amplification through the Timeline and News Feed is inherently key to awareness and viral distribution of the brand’s message, but it’s even more important because those stories in the Timeline and News Feed are more accessible by mobile users (63 percent of Facebook users) than the solution, itself, today. This focus on the “story” can mean success or failure of the program as it relates to actual business outcomes — the metrics that matter.

There are also other ways to have consumers effectively story-tell through a branded social experience: Rich Media News Feed Experiences. This is an HTML5 experience on mobile and a Flash media unit that is the experience within a promoted page post, or pushed out of a custom experience on Facebook (by either a user or a page). Both can be activated and engaged with directly within the News Feed.

Even into Q2 of 2013, these are rare for brands, but they are extremely effective at engaging users. Some, like Dunkin Donuts, Rovio, and Lexus have leveraged such units in their social repertoire. At Stuzo, we make sure that clients are intimately aware of the possibilities; one of our most successful Rich News Feed Experiences was for People’s Choice Awards this past season, which enabled fans to explore all of the award categories and vote for their favorite nominee. This gives users the full voting functionality in-stream and exposes them to the main business metric for the People’s Choice Awards — votes — without having to leave their News Feed browsing experience.
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This is a guest post by Bill Hankes, a director at Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.

The amount of data Facebook ingests every day is roughly equivalent to the total amount of Internet traffic at the height of the Internet bubble. Think about that. The amount of data back in 1998 was so immense that search technology couldn’t keep up, and a company called Google was founded to help people access this burgeoning corpus of information.

Interestingly, we face the same dilemma today with Facebook that users of the World Wide Web faced years ago. We know there’s a wealth of useful knowledge housed in social networks that we’d like to intelligently access, but the tools today are still relatively young.

The data created every day on social networks is just as important as any other content being published on the web. Maybe even more so because it’s from a source you may know or trust. Suppose your friend posted a photo using her new Olympus underwater camera on a recent scuba trip, or your foodie friend checked in on Facebook or Foursquare at the new local gastro-pub? How might that information influence your decisions or help you get something done? What are the implications for brands given the availability of social data in search?
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This is a guest post by Mario Zelaya, Managing Director at Majestic Media, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer & digital marketing agency, specializing in custom apps and promotions for web and mobile.

Facebook has been vigilant in its effort to improve adverting options on the Facebook Platform. They’ve been very smart and creative about the options now available to marketers. Sadly, few marketers know or see the full power of the features available to them.

Our duty as a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer is to share our knowledge and expertise, namely about one of the most underestimated and powerful marketing tools available on the Facebook Platform: Partner Categories.

Partner Categories builds on top of Custom Audiences, launched back in the fall of 2012. The new product allows advertisers to target their ads to 500 unique segments, provided by Datalogix, Acxiom and Epsilon. Each segment is based on actions these users have taken or are likely to take.

For those who don’t know the back story: Facebook accomplishes this through a partnership that allowed them to match online data with offline actions taken at physical store locations. Partner Categories then collects user data from activity across the web and makes it available to advertisers on Facebook. Advertisers are now able to utilize this information, including user’s location, online purchases, and browsing histories, to better target their advertising.
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This is a guest post by Greg Lieber, VP of Business Development at SHIFT, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer that offers a collaboration platform for marketers.

Facebook’s updates to the Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) requirements, which put a large emphasis on paid media, will be a huge benefit to both developers and marketers alike.

These changes reflect the fact that the PMD team is refreshing the important ecosystem it created by reminding marketers that the Paid, Owned, and Earned media paradigm is here to stay on Facebook. The new requirements may seem daunting for PMDs not focused primarily on paid media, but compliance will yield a major benefit by allowing PMDs to concentrate on their core competencies through the pursuit of smart partnerships.
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This is a guest post by Ampush co-founder and CMO Chris Amos. Ampush is a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer qualified in ads.

The recent expansion of Facebook’s Custom Audiences, a targeting mechanism that enables marketers to reach their offline audiences on Facebook, now includes options for businesses to use third-party customer behavior data to pinpoint the ads they run on the social network.

By offering more options for marketers to target their audiences, Facebook is gaining ground in its ongoing innovation battle with Google, and marketing budgets should follow.

Facebook’s partnerships with Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom and BlueKai allow enterprises to create predefined or custom first-party targeting categories, so now businesses of all sizes can target categories like “soda drinkers” or “people who browsed for a specific make/model of car on my website” and reach those consumers on Facebook.

Multi-channel marketing is taking off, and with Facebook providing advertisers access to a consistent and engaging user experience across mobile and desktop News Feeds, Facebook is solidifying its position as the ideal platform to spend ad dollars. The social platform is catalyzing three major paradigm shifts that have changed consumer expectations and opened up new possibilities for advertisers — personalization, virality and mobile/multi-device proliferation.
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This is a guest post by Zazzle Media Social and Data Insight Manager Ben Harper.

Facebook’s announcement last week that Custom Audiences targeting was to be expanded to include categories based on real life purchase and preference data is the latest in a string of Facebook ad targeting developments that have put the platform in the No. 1 position in terms of targeting ability.

Facebook advertising’s precise interests and social profile targeting features have always had a slight edge on Google in terms of knowing about the users targeted, but now this can officially be combined with desire to purchase and real world data I’d expect to see the balance of power in the online advertising world begin to gradually shift.

Facebook v. Google In Ad Targeting

Google’s key targeting methods are by keyword based search query, interest categories, placement targeting, remarketing and contextual-based targeting. Until recently, Facebook could only compete with the interest categories by using precise interests and broad category targeting, but things have changed dramatically over the past 6 months.
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This is a guest post by IronMonk cofounder Amine Rahal.

It still amazes me today that so many businesses are — unknowingly? — running illegal contests and promotions on their Facebook fan pages.

Fan page owners don’t seem to know that you can’t just post a message on your wall and call it a contest. Facebook has put out some strict guidelines when it comes to running promotions, giveaways and sweepstakes on a fan page.

Is this the result of businesses hiring inexperienced social media managers? Or is this the result of Facebook being too shy about enforcing its guidelines? Regardless, as a fan page owner, you should know that breaching these rules can actually get you banned from the big social network. If you don’t want to risk that, keep reading.

This is what you have to remember when it comes to running legal contests/promotions on Facebook:
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This is a guest post by SocialCode CEO Laura O’Shaughnessy. SocialCode is a digital agency and Washington Post Co. subsidiary that focuses on social media marketing and advertising.

One of the most high-potential advertising features on social media is Facebook’s Custom Audiences. Over the past three years, advertising capabilities have skyrocketed on social media platforms – specifically, the ability to deploy very targeted ads to drive response. For example, Twitter rolled out targeted Tweets this summer, a capability that allows the targeting of promoted tweets to followers by geo location and device.

Facebook Custom Audiences takes that micro-level of targeting to a whole new level. The product lets brands upload lists of potential and existing customers to Facebook and then serve specific ads targeted to those groups. For example, an automobile brand could upload a list of customers that had bought an entry level car with them four years ago and then serve those contacts targeted ads encouraging them to learn about new cars.

In our experience with Custom Audiences, we have witnessed a surprisingly low number of brands taking advantage of this incredibly powerful targeting capability, but we have seen extremely beneficial results for the small number who have. Overall, in campaigns using the feature we have recorded that Custom Audiences:

• Acquired fans at a rate 1.5x than general targeting
• Engaged at a rate more than 3x than general targeting
• CTR outperformed general target CTR by over 70 percent

With results like these and very few takers, we took a closer look to determine why adoption of Custom Audiences Targeting has been slow out of the gate.
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