Facebook Connect May Introduce Social to Advertising

Using social networks for advertising has proved to be a real challenge for marketers.  Users want the networks for personal socializing and dislike ads.  Yet, the personal recommendation of a product is the best marketing anyone can get, so marketers aren’t giving up.  Marketing Vox posts that in another attempt to harness the power of social networks, Facebook is introducting Connect.  Connect makes an existing third party website (like Hulu, Discovery or Digg) available to a group of friends to view and comment on together.  In other words, this external content becomes part of the conversation.  Want to watch a video together on Hulu?  Do it through Facebook and share the time with your friends.  This makes the event more valuable to advertisers, in theory.  As always, the ultimate force driving this is how attractive the content itself is:  if Facebook friends share an interest in content that is valuable to them, the ads will be seen.  If the content isn’t any good, forget about it.  So, leveraging the content of a site like Hulu makes good sense — and undoubtedly means Hulu will want part of the action.