Are Facebook Users Really Passionate?

I don't usually use this blog for personal musings and miscellaneous whatnot, but this was too good to pass up. Today I saw an ad on WebProNews trying (unsuccessfully for probably the 100th time) to get me to sign up for a $25 Facebook advertiser credit. In the ad they claim that Facebook has "100 million passionate users!"

Now I don't exactly spend a lot of time on Facebook and those that know me know I'm not exactly a huge fan of their service or business model (many analysts share my opinion). Nonetheless, our company is a Facebook advertiser, and we've run quite a few campaigns on Facebook.

We've also researched Facebook's ad effectiveness among our peers and have consistently found that Facebook is consistently the worst performing advertising channel. So is it our fault as advertisers? I think not. I've run highly targeted ad campaigns on Facebook that have gotten 0.005% ad CTR. These are virtually identical to ad campaigns we've run on other networks (including our own) that got 1-2% CTR and in some abysmal, weakly targetd scenarios the CTR has approached 0.5%. Still nowhere near as bad as Facebook.

For our campaigns to perform this poorly (when compared to other networks) there is either a tremendous LACK of passion on Facebook or what I suspect is simply the fact that people are very goal and action oriented on Facebook. They don't want to be distracted by ads while they're in the middle of a conversation with a friend or posting an item on someone's wall. Social Networking ad inventory has historically proven to be the worst of any traffic. It's weakly targeted (no matter how refined you think you can get) and people simply don't like to click on ads while they're doing things.

Now on the other hand, there's a lot of value in branded, content driven networks that offer up targeted niche specific traffic. These viewers DO click on ads and they ARE open to brand messaging. But these networks won't offer up "100 million passionate users". You might be lucky and find large media networks that can deliver a million or so "passionate" and well directed viewer per month. But these networks will convert tremendously higher and offer a much higher ROI and engagement.

Sometimes it's nicer for an advertiser to be able to just look at a branded, niche specific web property and know that they're targeting engaged, content consuming viewers who are receptive to view and respond to ads targeted towards their needs and wants!

And lets face it... not every Facebook user is passionate...at least not about Facebook. I'm not! And I suspect that a vast percentage of the millions of users that haven't talked to each other in real life in 15 years aren't either! So what are Facebook users passionate about? That's the billion dollar question!

Here is something I want you to think about though. What is passion? Is it some abject emotion that exists in a vacuum? No, of course not. Passion is an emotion with a subject. Passion can also be ambivalent, having both positive and negative connotations. Incendia Media knows about passionate users, we actively engage them on a daily basis. We know how hot these flames can run and how to build the right kind of passion. Incendia builds brands that users become passionate about, in a good way.

So think about what kind of passion exists on Facebook and whether or not it's good for your brand.