Meet The 30 Biggest Advertisers On Facebook

It tweeted, 'It's all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.'

Ford global sales and marketing vp Jim Farley told the Wall Street Journal this year he has deepened his use of Facebook: 'Someone who 'likes' you on Facebook is substantially more willing to advocate the brand.'

HSBC learned early that simply not being on Facebook can be a crisis management handicap when, in 2007, it was the target of a Facebook-based protest movement by British students angry that their interest-free overdrafts were being scrapped by the bank.

HSBC now has a Facebook page for students, and once considered -- and denied -- it was setting up its own dedicated social network for customers.

Budweiser leveraged its Facebook fanbase this year for promotions such as its sponsored Made In America music festival in Philadelphia -- fans were offered pre-sale tickets before non-fans.

In 2011, Bud live-streamed the FA Cup final for fans on its Facebook page.

In 2010, Budweiser offered a free beer to people turning 22 on Facebook.

Here's a case study of Budweiser's Facebook activity around the World Cup.

It got that honour in return for a media buy, GigaOm reported.

Since then, McD's has 'won' the Facebook fan race: By July of this year, it had amassed 20.5 million fans to Burger King's 5.2 million, according to Ignite Social Media.

That year, the first 20,000 small businesses to sign up received $100 in free Facebook advertising.

Visa spent big on Facebook this summer for the Olympics, according to Ad Age:

'We threw down the gauntlet at an all-hands marketing meeting early on, that we will make this the most social games for us and for any other sponsor so far,' said Kevin Burke, global CMO for core products.

Visa then extended the challenge to its ad agencies, Omnicom Group's TBWA, Atmosphere Proximity and OMD. Later, Visa invited partners Facebook and Google to contribute ideas.

Previously, it did app promotions around the Super Bowl.

It did so with an effort targeting BMX and skateboarders, from 2011. In 2010, it broke its epic 'Write the Future' World Cup campaign on Facebook before the ads aired on TV.

Here's a video of Nike marketing execs explaining their logic for moving on Facebook before going to traditional media:

Each channel has a Facebook page, and each show on those channels has its own individual Facebook presence.

TV show fans tend to sound off on social networks, and Turner therefore cannot afford to be without a constant presence.

Chase became the biggest bank on Facebook at the end of 2011 and now has an always-on presence on the site.

Its charity and small business efforts are also conducted through Facebook.

Citibank sponsors so many different things -- concerts, the arts, charities -- that its Facebook page is incredibly busy. It's also one of Citi's main CRM channels: Disgruntled customers get quick answers from the bank's social media staff.

Most famously, L'Oreal used Salesforce's Marketing Cloud (formerly Buddy Media) to give 5,000 salons access to the Buddy Media social marketing suite.

L'Oreal furnished content for all the locations, including how-to videos, an appointment-booking engine and info about L'Oréal products.

It reached approximately 1.7 million clients, according to Salesforce, with some salons seeing gross sales increases of more than $4,000.

Disney launched up to 10 Facebook games this year.

CEO Bob Iger said, 'We feel very good about it. It is not a huge business for us, it is one that we're going to continue to be in.'

The Disney corporation alone has more than 38 million fans and multiples of that across its 200 or more individual brands.

As early as 2009, Dell was making $9 million a year in revenues from sales generated by Facebook and other social media.

This year, Dell did a Facebook app promotion for Lollapalooza.

Dell has a whole Facebook page just for social media marketing advice.

Facebook dedicated a team of marketing executives to the launch of Samsung's Galaxy III phone, according to the FT.

Samsung was also the first client to buy Facebook's logout page takeover. 65 million people saw the ads.

Brian Wallace, VP-strategic marketing for Samsung Mobile, said Samsung spends twice as much on maintaining its Facebook presence as it does on advertising, according to Ad Age.

Nestle has made some missteps in social media, such as when it got into a war with its critics on its own Facebook page, and when it accidentally used an image that looked like Pedobear to advertise Kit Kat.

But the company has 670K followers on Facebook, excluding separate pages for its brands. Its head of marketing and consumer communication, Tom Buday, is on Facebook's client council.

Unilever and Facebook have a charity partnership to provide clean drinking water to communities in need.

And, more to the point, Unilever CMO Keith Weed is on Facebook's client council.

EBay has a partnership with Facebook which integrates Facebook's Open Graph global commerce platforms. It's intended to encourage developers to create eBay apps on Facebook that will generate more business for the auction site.

Verizon has done some huge fanning campaigns by offering free exclusive TV content via FIOS for Facebook fans only, such as this Green Day concert.

FIOS has also had a Facebook widget -- which TV watchers can call up and use on-screen -- for years.

Google advertises its Chrome browser on Facebook, and Chrome has a set of Facebook extensions that get 34,000 weekly downloads.

Microsoft, of course, used to serve all Facebook's ads until the social network took control of its own ad serving.

The company continues to provide Facebook with search services, and historically it has had a search affiliate advertising agreement with Facebook.

One of its Facebook promotions made headlines earlier this year when it offered to send the performer Pitbull to the Walmart store that received the most likes from shoppers. The contest was hijacked by trolls, who liked Walmart's remote Kodiak, Alaska, store 70,000 times. Pitbull and Walmart honored the result anyway, and Pitbull bought some bear repellent (and enjoyed the headlines).

The Groupon/AdParlor 'exclusive contract represents tens of millions of dollars in spend, as Groupon uses Facebook ads extensively to drive email signups and sell daily deals,' according to InsideFacebook.

Also, Groupon's mobile app is integrated with Facebook.

The consumer credit monitoring company uses its page to promote financial literacy and encourage saving, via chatty questions and quizzes.

Experian Marketing Services, meanwhile, is one of the earliest ad buying services on Facebook, and its Alchemy unit buys ads for other clients.

Experian's Techlightenment unit offers social media advertising, brand monitoring, polling, and social CRM services on Facebook. It has a partnership with AdKnowledge, whose Facebook ad buying unit AdParlor is a huge Facebook ad buyer.

Famously, P&G began cutting its traditional media budget as a proportion of sales after CEO Bob McDonald told Wall Street he realised free viral exposure on Facebook was more efficient than than the brute-force buying of ratings points on TV.

Procter & Gamble said it expected to generate $500 million in sales from its social-media based Olympics push, much of it on Facebook. 30-four P&G brands sponsored 150 Olympic athletes, and the effort was tied around platforms on Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest.

In its IPO filings, Facebook said P&G staged a Facebook campaign around Secret deodorant for girls, which led to a 9% increase in Secret sales.

EA spent $2.75 million advertising just one of its titles in 2012, Battlefield 3. According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, EA saw a 440% return on its investment in sales.

EA has also gone after Zynga in a suit claiming the online Facebook game maker copied 'The Sims Social' to make its game, 'The Ville.' Clearly, there's a war for Facebook's gaming turf going on.

EA's revenues from online games have gone up 37% this year.

Fab's Facebook page has 224,000 Likes.

The company uses Facebook as one its CRM channels.

Virtually anyone who posts a question on Fab's page gets a personalised response.

Zynga is on course to spend more than $200 million on sales and marketing this year, according to its SEC disclosures.

A huge part of that is 'player acquisition costs' -- ads on Facebook, basically.

Player acquisition costs are the fastest-rising part of Zynga's sales and marketing expenses (which include stock and staff salary expenses).

These Are The 30 Most Creative People In Advertising Under 30 >