Facebook’s Sponsored Stories – What it is and How it Works For Brands
by Tyler Willis
Sponsored Stories is a new ad unit from Facebook that allows brands to extend the distribution of existing activities that users undertake with them on the network.
Let’s say you check in at a Starbucks; some of your 130 friends will see that. In most cases, the ones who see it will be the people who interact with you most frequently. If the update is popular and generates a large number of likes and comments, a higher percentage of your friends will see it.
Facebook’s new ad product allows Starbucks to pay for that same message being distributed inside of an ad unit to all of your 130 friends. The goal is to provide wider distribution and visibility to the updates and actions that you’ve taken, and allow that to hopefully influence your friends.
Basically, Starbucks wants to say: “Hey, people love going into Starbucks. They’re checking in on Facebook; they’re liking our updates.” Now they can actually buy ads from Facebook to highlight this. Historically, a brand could only put videos or content they created inside of ads – now they can leverage the true social conversation by highlighting content from users. Ads can have better social proof.
So now a brand can go to Facebook, buy a spot, and fill it with whatever actions their fans are taking. And it’s predicated on that action already existing in the network. This is not a new piece of content.
Facebook Sponsored Stories shows up inside of an ad unit on the right hand side of the page that is clearly marked as an ad unit, but contains the content of the actions you and your friends have taken.
Source: Inside Facebook
So if I checked in at Starbucks with a couple of my co-workers and wrote, “Man, really need a caffeine burst at 4 pm, love this Starbucks,” that could show up inside of an ad unit but only to people that already have a relationship with me on Facebook; only my friends would see it.
Opting Out
The question of opting in and out has caused a lot of friction in the media. There is no ability to opt out of having your actions used in Sponsored Stories, and this has drawn the ire of many commentators.
One vitriolic comparison being made is to Beacon, Facebook’s failed ad product from a few years back. Beacon reported users’ actions on the web back to their friends. For example, if I rented a movie from Blockbuster online, that could be pushed back into my Facebook news stream.
The comparison is an apt one, both products focus on helping brands use a consumer’s existing actions to reach their friends. But Sponsored Stories differs in that it is promoting a Facebook action, an interaction model that they’ve introduced and that you’ve used gets distributed to your friends.
One example of the distinction between the two ad products is that no one checks into a diamond store unless they want their girlfriend to see that they are planning to propose.
When I write a status update, I’m putting that content out for my friends to see by default. The brand is simply amplifying distribution so more of those friends see it.
I understand the negative reaction some people have to that, and no doubt we’ll hear more about that in the press – but that reaction happens with almost every ad product, and I don’t think it will de-rail Sponsored Stories’ success.
And while currently there is no way to opt out; I think Facebook may introduce one in the future – they have little to lose by allowing an opt-out option that most users won’t know about.
The Involver Perspective
At Involver, we built our brand on relationships with our customers, and now have over 150,000 companies and brands that use our platform. We’ve built our company without much paid advertising and very little traditional marketing. Instead, we’ve focused on creating content that engages people and connects them through word of mouth.
Prior to exploring Sponsored Stories for ourselves, we observed that while people like our Facebook Fan Page, leave great comments, or check in at our headquarters, it doesn’t really go as wide as it possibly could. A few of their friends might see a check in, depending on how close they are to a person, but that doesn’t make it very visible.
We started using Sponsored Stories as a way to amplify how people interact with us, because we know that when we tell that story at large, it’s going to make people want to work with us more, and learn more about our company. We see it as a really powerful tool to amplify content that already exists. It’s working very well for us.
If you’re considering Sponsored Stories for your brand, you want to first get some intelligence on how people are interacting with you in order to understand the message you’re amplifying. Because you don’t get to pick and choose just the positive reactions or just certain stories, you’re basically saying that any time someone has this type of interaction with you, you’re going to broadcast it out. And it doesn’t matter who it is, or whether the comment they wrote was, “Love this Starbucks,” or “Man I hate this place.”
Presumably, you already have some organic, interesting content, and people are already interacting with you in a positive way. We use our Audience Management Platform to gauge this. It’s a powerful way to monitor content, track sentiment, and add alerts to understand when people are posting spam or obscene content to our wall.
But more importantly, it allows us to track the tenor of the conversation. When people check in or write something, what are they saying? Is it positive? How do they feel about our brand? How do they feel about what we’re producing? We checked out sentiment reports from the last couple weeks and saw a very good engagement, very good numbers there, and that gave us the confidence to run Sponsored Stories.
Right now, to actually run a sponsored story, you have to contact your Facebook account manager or sales rep to set it up. However, it does appear that Sponsored Stories will be made available as self-serve, at least that is the word on the street, so even a smaller business or someone that doesn’t have a direct sales relationship with Facebook will be able to make use of it.
Choosing Which Social Actions to Amplify
Once you’ve selected which type of action you want to amplify (likes, check-ins, etc.), you decide how many impressions you’re going to buy and you’re done. From that point on, any story that meets those criteria will be amplified.
As a brand, the key thing to understand is that you have to monitor what content is being created, and know that you might end up amplifying some of the wrong brand messages, but as long as you’re keeping track of the trend and the overall tenor of the conversation, you can still move the needle incredibly effectively in a positive direction.
We live in a social world now and brands need to be comfortable with the fact that people are creating relationships with their friends, with brands, and with all kinds of ideas and concepts mixed in between, and the messaging can run the gamut from positive to negative. By tracking it, and learning the tools to properly amplify the channels with positive messages, brands can build massive social proof and social credibility.
Note: to succeed in this world, you have to actually create the positive messages first.
Facebook’s Mission & the Conversation “Out There”
You hear this phrase a lot: “People are already talking about your brand.” It’s probably the summary of 90% of talks given at social media conferences. “There’s a conversation out there about your brand, so you have to pay attention to it.” It is true, if not incredibly actionable.
With that said, we have some customers who enter into this world and find that the tone of the conversation going on about them isn’t positive. They might be a great company and providing a good service, but the primary reason people interact with them is to complain, to talk about customer service issues, or to highlight something they don’t like about the company’s practice.
It can be a struggle to figure out how to use social media when the conversation is negative. You may want to use all these cool tools, but you have to build the latticework first.
Sponsored Stories is an example of a tool that rewards companies who have taken the necessary steps to build good feeling — you need good social proof before you can use it inside of an ad unit. And honestly, that’s what Sponsored Stories is; providing social proof inside of an ad unit.
Sponsored Stories gives us a look into what future Facebook ad products will look like. Facebook’s stated mission is to connect people with more information and to make information more transparent. Sponsored Stories is a pretty good blending of that mission with the reality of needing to make money. This type of advertising rewards businesses who invest in things like building relationships with their customers, and good customer service.
A Final Note on Beacon
There are elements of Beacon that have kind of been torn apart and remixed into Sponsored Stories, and while Beacon was a failure, it’s original mission was a step in the right direction. I think Sponsored Stories is going to be a clear winner, risen from Beacon’s ashes.
As we start to explore the types of actions that can be fed into this type of ad unit, such as liking open graph outlets on a website, or leaving a comment on a Facebook comment stream in a widget or blog post, I think we’ll see more and more natively social actions work their way into those sidebars, and I think we’ll see Facebook continue to innovate in this area, including rolling Sponsored Stories out in a self-serve manner.
Small businesses, pay attention to that last line. When that happens, you will benefit disproportionately because you are already operating under a LEDRR marketing model that creates the types of relationships that easily translate to online social proof. Also see Tyler Willis, Slideshare, A Brief History of Marketing.
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