For those of you that aren’t familiar, Facebook’s Ads platform allows advertisers to target ads towards users whose profiles include certain keywords. Today, AllFacebook is reporting that facebook will now refer to this keyword targeting not as “keyword” targeting but as “likes and interests”. While a subtle change, this, from a marketing perspective, may actually be pretty brilliant. “Target ads to users who like the Boston Red Sox” sounds a lot sexier than “Target ads to users who have the words boston red sox somewhere in their profile information”. Moreover, the “likes and interests” language is clearly distinct from the “keywords” language that just about every other ad platform on the Internet uses. Furthermore, it’s a language that Google and the other top ad networks can’t speak that fluently.
However, what is most intriguing to me is if and when Facebook will be launching a likes and interests Suggest tool similar to that of Google’s Keyword Suggest Tool. Assuming Facebook is tracking the necessary ad click data+metadata (which I’m all but sure they are given that they seem to track everything), such a tool would be a boon to all advertisers, but especially those (majority) advertisers who are unfamiliar with social advertising.
