With hundreds of millions of Facebook users now engaging on the social network through the use of Android, iPhone and iPad apps it was only a matter of time before the company began serving ads to those platforms and that time now appears to be as early as March.

Sources close to the world’s largest social network say executives at Facebook have already discussed proposed advertising plans with advertising agencies and plan to offer paid “Featured stories” in mobile news feeds as a way to supplement ad space on smaller mobile device displays.

By mixing in sponsored ads with friends feeds users don’t lose screen space and only receive ads that match their interests and the interests of their friends.

Facebook has estimated that almost half of its 845 million users access the network via mobile devices, even one ad served per user per day would mean billions of new ad impressions for the network.  read more

Facebook on Tuesday announced that “Sponsored Stories” are now appearing on the pages of each users Facebook account via the new “ticker” option located on the far upper right hand corner of their screens.

Still under a great deal of scrutiny by Facebook users who don’t like the new News Feed and Ticker revamp that rolled out in September the new feature places ads directly inside a users ticker right next to other status updates, link shares and other information from their friends list.

The plan is part of Facebook’s inevitable push to have as much information as possible placed in front of users, for example Spotify playlists can now be seen in a users profile.

Speaking about their decision to add the sponsored feature into their news feed a Facebook rep noted:

“Sponsored Stories now appear in Ticker on the home page, Sponsored Stories are an extension of News Feed, so we think it’s natural that they appear in Ticker.” read more

Facebook took some time at “Advertising Week” in New York to announce a new type of ad format as well as a new analytics tool meant to encourage brands to post more “compelling content.”

Based on the new format an ad will expand if a friend “Likes” the brand. Once expanded the new user will be able to see other comments about the brand while adding their own comment.

The ads are added to “Sponsored Stories” and “Social Ads” which tell you if a friend interacts with a brand.

According to Facebook their own research with Like Ads supporting a Starbucks campaign showed that fans spend 8% longer interacting with the new ad format compared to other formats currently offered by the social network. read more

I don’t get Facebook’s advertising policies, I constantly receive crappy ads asking me to lose weight, work from home and perform other mundane tasks that I don’t want or need, yet when someone tries to send me to their Google Plus profile in the form of an advert, a site where even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a profile those ads are deleted and the advertiser is banned from the networks promotions system.

That’s the exact scenario that happened to Michael Lee Johnson this week when he created a Facebook ad which asked Facebook users to join him via his Google Plus profile.

Not only did Facebook shut down Michael’s Google Plus ad campaign, they shut down all of his other advertising campaigns on the social network and then banned him from using the advert system all together, even for non-Google Plus ads. read more

Epic Unfriend: Have 8 million Facebook users in US, Canada, and Europe pushed the deactivate button?

Facebook lost nearly 8 million active users in May this year and posted lower new user registrations in May, leading to speculations that the social networking giant’s target of reaching 1 billion users by February might take a bit longer.

Notwithstanding that Goldman partners put a stamp of approval on the $50 billion valuation for Facebook early this year, being the biggest and most active social networking site on the planet could provide strong support for appraisals of share prices should Facebook push through with an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2012.  That is if Facebook actually opens up more of its financial documents and trumps the vital signs of LinkedIn.

Apart from dreams of pouring over the Great Fire Wall of China like a tsunami and continuing to find new user growth in late adapter countries, there is the idea that Facebook’s ubiquitous presence through social media stream integration and comments on sites will continue to propel its growth in years to come.

read more

Facebook wants users to watch entire ads from their advertisers and to accomplish that goal they are now paying site visitors to view adverts. Launched on Thursday the company is now offering Facebook Credits to watch certain video based ads.

Facebook Credits can be used to purchase in-app products, such as products found in Farmville and they can be used on Facebook’s new Facebook Deals platform, a competitor to Groupon that offers daily deals with offers often discounted 50% or more on retail goods and services.

The price for watching an ad isn’t huge, right now just one Facebook credit ($.10), but it does signal a new way to engage users who might typically exit video ads as they appear.  read more

Are you sick and tired of seeing teeth whitening ads on your Facebook account? Or perhaps even ads that seem to fully miss your lifestyle? Facebook may soon have an alternative, the social networking company this month began testing a new way to target users by data mining their real-time conversations.

The current testing environment is only targeting 1% of Facebook users, an amount equal to approximately 6 million users, not a bad study group.

The move marks yet another attempt by Facebook to more directly target users, you may recall that they recently began offering “sponsored stories” in which users brand interactions are posted via a side bar with included ads.

The new program is simple, for example a user may type “I really want to buy a new pair of Nike basketball shoes” at which point they may immediately see a Nike ad, perhaps a coupon for “x amount” off a pair of shoes at Foot Locker.

For users who may be a bit confused, it is true that targeted ads have been offered for some time now on Facebook, however a real-time based ad platform is a new opportunity for the world’s largest social network.

The platform is being tested on only 1% of users because Facebook says the algorithm they use is so complex that it must be tweaked to perform at levels advertisers will appreciate. Unlike search engines such as Google and Bing, Facebook often ignores keywords and looks at other factors to determine which ads will best target their core user groups. read more