New York - Facebook unveiled new ways for businesses to plug their brands, including to mobile users for the first time, allowing them reach its 845 million users directly across all devices as it races toward a multibillion dollar IPO.
With new “Premium on Facebook” features, advertisers can even push messages directly onto users' newsfeeds on both computers and mobile devices, giving them a presence on valuable Internet real estate at the risk of alienating users with intrusive ads.
Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg led a major charm offensive on Madison Avenue advertisers, touting revamped pages or mini-websites and timelines that marketers can use to promote brands and businesses.
Other new features let companies, as well as celebrities and brands, create self-contained mini-websites within Facebook using the Timeline format it introduced for users' profile pages earlier this year.
Facebook Pages will be available for smartphones starting later this year, executives said at an event attended by hundreds of advertising and marketing executives.
Businesses initially seemed to like the expanded marketing arsenal, particularly the newfound ability to target a growing population of cellphone-toting media consumers.
“Mobile Facebook ads are huge. We'll be all over this,” said Jason Goldberg, chief executive of online designer retailer Fab.com. “We're already seeing more than 40 percent of our daily traffic to Fab from mobile. Being able to reach Facebook mobile users will only increase that.”
Facebook is vying with Google, Yahoo and other online publishers for a slice of the estimated $76 billion that companies spend on US television and magazine advertising each year, according to research firm eMarketer.
The world's No. 1 social network - which relied on advertising for 85 percent of its $3.7 billion in 2011 revenue - is ramping up efforts to attract the budgets of large companies and advertisers ahead of its initial public offering.
Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room, plans to raise $5 billion in an IPO expected to value the company at $75 billion to $100 billion, in Silicon Valley's largest-ever coming-out party.
Some investors worry about Facebook's over-reliance on advertising dollars. But the issue didn't come up in New York on Wednesday as Facebook and marketing executives came onstage to talk up the new features.
Businesses can set up pages on Facebook for free, but the idea, executives said, is that companies whose pages attract a lot of customers might be interested in advertising on the service as well.
Macy's, Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart Stores were among the first to roll out new versions of their Facebook pages that gave them more leeway to design splashy, media-rich pages.
A new, chronological timeline on the right side of the page lets businesses create customized pages that incorporate images of memorabilia and milestones in a company's history.
Facebook is the leader in the US online display advertising market, accounting for roughly 28 percent of all the graphical display ads viewed in 2011, according to industry research firm Gartner. Within the broader advertising market however, it remains a minnow.
Facebook has become an increasingly popular advertising medium for small and medium-sized businesses, from dentists and real estate agents to local restaurants.
Although many brands such as AT&T, Dell and Virgin Media advertise on Facebook, analysts say the social network still has a lot of work to do to become a prime destination for large advertisers.
Many of the companies that have created pages on Facebook simply use the service as a free marketing tool rather than paying to run ad campaigns on Facebook. - Reuters