Photo: Facebook / L’Oreal
Facebook gets $1 billion dollars per quarter in advertising revenue, but remarkably little is known about who its biggest clients are.Nielsen doesn’t measure Facebook adspend. Kantar doesn’t either.
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But with Business Insider’s Social Media ROI conference coming up in three days’ time, we thought it would be appropriate to find out who’s investing the most in Facebook’s paid media.
We asked internal sources at Facebook, as well as external executives at Facebook’s client companies, to tell us what they knew about Facebook’s top spenders. Our friends at ComScore also supplied us with some incredibly useful information about ad impressions served in social media. We also looked at previously published reports about ad spending on Facebook.
Combing that data together allowed us to rank the companies by dollars spent, for a period roughly covering the last 12 months.
Some of the results are surprising. Who knew, for instance, that cable TV company Turner probably spends more on Facebook ads than most other companies due to its heavy promotion of its channels, like CNN?
Others, less so. You can probably guess the No.1 biggest ad client of Facebook, if you think about it.
Our list has its flaws: Some key sources declined to cooperate with our survey, and we’ve doubtlessly missed some companies or gotten brand names ranked in the wrong order. Nonetheless, we’re confident that our ranking is the best available outside of Facebook vp/global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson’s office. (And you can email us if you have better information that could make this list more accurate.)
Stay tuned: On Thursday, when BI’s Social Media ROI conference kicks off, we’ll publish a ranking of the biggest ad spenders in all of social media, not just Facebook. (Disclosure: The author owns Facebook stock.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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