Over the past several years Facebook has become the largest social network in the world. Facebook allows advertisers to easily create ads and target them to other Facebook users based on their location and specific interests. Until now we could only speculate how Facebook’s user base was consuming our precious ads.

Click the Infographic below for the full sized version:

The industry recently received fresh data measuring social clicks time frames from our good friends at Bit.ly. Thanks to Raka Creative for preparing an awesome infographic to display the data.

The simple analysis version: It’s expensive to get followers, unless $1.50-3.00 per follower seems reasonable. Clicks from sponsored tweets on the other hand seem to be averaging $0.50-$0.75 per visit. Sponsored tweets containing a flyer or a coupon to people in your area interested in your services can have a measurable impact.

Here is simple overview from Twitter’s YouTube:

Anyone with a twitter account can create paid ads. Creating and properly managing a business Twitter account is just one part of a complete social networking strategy necessary for companies of all sizes. Let Firecyde help put together your Twitter Ad campaigns.

Contact us for a simple overview of how we can put Twitter Ads to work for your business.

The initial results are amazing compared to what we’ve seen happening with Facebook’s display ads recently. CTR rates from 0.5 – 1% are being achieved across the board for most advertisers. Currently access to the sponsored search results is limited to Facebook advertisers with access to the Power Editor Tool.

Here is a quote directly from Facebook:
“Advertisers can create standard on-site ads (with a 70 character message) that lead to Facebook pages or apps (including custom tabs on their page). Ads can be targeted against Facebook entities, including Pages, Places, Apps, and subscribe-enabled users. Facebook users see the ad when the targeted entity appears in their search results. Ads only show in desktop search results, not on mobile and not on the “more results” page.”

Let us get started now on your Facebook’s Sponsored Search Results campaigns. First in wins. Bidding competition is already becoming intense for some market segments but others are wide open and can be milked for cheaper sales leads and new customer contacts.

One of the main rumors is that this will improve Facebook’s mobile technology, as there are many synergies between facial recognition technology and cell phone cameras (imagine taking a family photo and having everyone automatically tagged).

Other users are worried that this acquisition as a big step in Facebook’s threat to our privacy. Every time a user is tagged in a photo, Facebook learns more and more about your face, and would even be able to tag a person with/without glasses, in different lighting, and with different facial hair. The idea of Facebook being able to somehow monetize your face is a pretty scary notion.

Shoe has been busy in front of the camera over the past few years with video projects like the Shoemoney System, YouTube Videos and setting up a world class studio in his new office location. Here is the first episode of the Shoemoney show in it’s entirety. The show features guest Danny Sullivan, founder of SearchEngineLand and organizer of various affiliate trade shows.

Want more Shoemoney? Check out the official Shoemoney Blog.

Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t have any capability to directly create frequency caps on ads, but you do have a few options that may produce some interesting side effects.

When you first create ads, typically you have to bid higher so they get a good test run on the network. The best performing ads will be much cheaper to run over the long because higher click through rates means higher cpms for facebook and lower prices per click for you. You should create 10 ads in 3 different campaigns to test a wide variety of targets.

If you’re bidding $0.70-$0.90/click this process will take 4 or 5 days. Try setting up some campaigns with small budgets initially. Typically $20.00-40/day is a good area to experiment. Once your best performing ads have 20-30 clicks, start lowering the bids .05 every 25 hits or so. Your hits/day may drop a slight amount, but the CTR on most of your ads will shoot up because they frequency of ad displays per user is cut in half. Once you notice more than 20-25% drop in your daily click volume per ad, you’ve pushed it about as far as you should go. A frequency of 2-3 is a good goal to shoot for.

Now is the time to increase the budgets daily and continue watching performance. It seems the Facebook ad system rewards the higher CTRs it sees and dumps additional loads of traffic on the ads that you walked the bids down on. Cheaper traffic in higher volumes, perfect!

Our new alliance with Jumptap will allow Firecyde to continue it’s expansion into mobile advertising, with particular attention to Android, using extremely detailed targeting options. Jumptap allows advertisers to target via keyword, time of day, headset type, operation system, network carrier and much more.

Creating and running advertising campaigns for smart phones is something most affiliates have got familiar with over the past couple years. We all remember the day that Chad King (FC’s affiliate manager at EWA Network) began pounding the table on mobile. Now the tablet market is exploding in a big way and we’re pounding the table so hard the floor is cracking – if you haven’t been paying attention, it’s time to get on board.

Mobile advertising can provide a huge benefit to almost any website, provided you have a clean mobile version of your content ready to serve to users. Local service marketing, affiliate offers, dating websites and everything else in between has been working well do to the extremely low cost and low competition inside the mobile advertising marketplace.

CartoonMeme allows anyone to easily create a meme using 100s of pre-formatted backgrounds. You can view the most popular memes, recent memes and albums for each background of the previously generated memes.

The site is monetized through advertisements. Future versions of the site will include more unique monetization paths we’re really excited about, so stay tuned.

Previously, MyAds was the self serve advertising network for MySpace.com. MyAds recently integrated into the Rubicon Network – a vast network of 600+ mega publishers – and while traffic numbers and volume may now be much higher, the quality of the traffic is unbelievable low.

While traffic volume may have struggled, Firecyde has enjoyed some impressively low conversion costs from MyAds over the past couple years. While people are fleeing from MyAds, we are still optimistic that after a few months of testing – and more testing – we’ll be able to master the new platform and channel targeting.