Advertising accounts for 85% of Facebook’s revenues. In wake of the company’s IPO, the social network is seeking for new channels of revenues in order to boost its attractiveness for investors. To increase the appeal for advertising companies, Facebook organized its first marketing conference in New York yesterday. The main topic at the conference was the relaunch of its advertising platform, which focuses on Facebook’s Brand Pages to bundle social marketing activities. Paid, earned und owned media are set to be interconnected like never before. The own Facebook page will serve as the one and only central hub for all future marketing activities.

Details in a nutshell: So-called ‘reach generators‘ will be employed to massively enhance the reach of paid advertising. There will be no clear distinction between content and advertisement. Only content that was posted in the NewsFeed before can be used as advertisement. The Timeline becomes mandatory for all Brand Pages. At the same time, mobile users shall also see and receive advertisements. Implementing these steps show how Facebook tries to make money out of the increased use of smartphones. The industry’s paper Advertising Age outlined what all these new developments mean for marketers.

Best campaigns on Facebook awarded the Social Studio Award

In order to increase the appeal of tailor made advertising space for advertising agencies, Facebook now awards the Social Studio Award for the best campaigns on the social platform. Key figures of big advertising agencies are giving out awards for campaigns that convey the idea of ‘Social by Design’ and have a convincing creative concept. Facebook likes to underscore that the user’s personal relationships should be the center of attention for every campaign or app. This not only means the sheer number of fans, but even more so the interaction with and involvement of users. Certainly, there are already quite a number of awards for digital campaigns out there. Facebook’s award is unfortunately not distinctive enough to stand out from the crowd. There were more than 1,000 applications from over 40 countries, but apart from the American Express campaign, which was already launched in 2010, the awards seemed to be given out quite randomly. However, it is a great pool of ideas for social campaigns.

Eleven campaigns from seven countries received an award in the end. The biggest award went to Digitas and CP+B for their American Express campaign ‘Small Business Saturday‘. The campaign was quite successful, helping smaller companies by making use of the AE’s established customer relationships. In 2010, AE announced the last Saturday in November – one of the peak shopping weekends in the US – to be the ‘Small Business Saturday’. The result: The number of fans doubled to reach 2.7 million and more than 500,000 companies declared themselves to be a ‘Small-Business-Day-Shop’. On average, these shops saw an increase of 29% in sales as compared to normal weekends.

AE’s successful Facebook campaign ‘Small Business Saturday‘