Facebook, the internet social networking site has chalked out yet another interesting strategy to bring its advertisers closer to its users. After target and personalized advertising, Facebook has now come up with the concept of “missed calls” advertisements.
This new type of ads lets the mobile phone users to click a button on the ad that calls the brand advertiser, who immediately disconnects the call and then calls the user back. In this process, the user isn’t charged much since the advertiser disconnects the call immediately.
The return call from the advertiser is basically a pre-recorded audio message which will have information about everything ranging from shopping discounts, cricket updates and celebrity news etc. All this minimizes the data usage charges for the user. This missed call ad service is being powered by a startup called Zipdial.
If rumors are to be believed, this missed call advertising was specially designed by Facebook keeping the Indian Market in mind. India has only 150 million Smartphone users out of its 1.2 billion people which mean that the rest of the people are either using feature phones or have no phones at all. The feature phones lack touch screen capability which means its user can’t interact much with the content on the screen of the phone.
These advertisements can be seen as the social networking site’s efforts to push its business in countries like India, Indonesia and Brazil, which in return would help the company in boosting its overall revenue.
Approximately 84% of the site’s 1.28 billion monthly users are stationed outside the US and Canada, but surprisingly the average revenue per user that the company makes in international markets is very less than what it does in the US and Canada.
The company has done several of these experiments in the past few years. It has used the target and personalized ads features which shows the user only the type of advertisements that they are likely to purchase or would be interested in, to super cookies which allowed the social networking site to track your online activities even after you have signed out.
According to Facebook, in its early tests of the missed call advertisements by Garnier Men, these ads resulted in a 2.5 times year on year increase in online sales. Facebook will make the missed call ads more widely available in the coming months.
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