Facebook Now Targeting Status Updates with Ads

As the targeted advertising noose becomes tighter around everyone’s neck, today Facebook announced that it was going to target ads based on a person’s status update. For instance, if their update referenced golf for example, the reader would be targeted with ads specific to golf.

Is this good or bad? From the advertiser perspective the reason why Facebook ads convert significantly better than any of the media sources I have tested is because of the laser targeting that you can use to generate conversions. The idea of casting a “wide keyword net” which is separately ranked by algorithms that are only being guessed over to determine what works and really only known by Big G is going away.

From the user perspective it is just one more bit of privacy that has been surrendered in order to use the Facebook website. A lot of times when trying to find a business contact I will type in that person’s name as well as the state and often times the search result are these “People Finder” websites that will charge me a nominal fee for the information they have gathered about that person. One of the major datasources they use to collect the information is Facebook and other social media websites.