Facebook’s challenge to google: What to Who

It seems as if the time for the search engine giant google being the only market leader holding maximum of online advertising revenue is going to be a history soon! It is not the case that the Google is getting a very stiff challenge from other search engines but from Facebook!Google is having a market share of about 80% among the global search engines.Google currently controls about 70% of the online advertising market.

As you all know Facebook is a social networking site like orkut (Google’s social networking site whose popularity is now just restricted to India & Brazil) having more than 500 million active users. It has now come with a superb platform to offer advertisers with more specifically targeting their prospective customers based on their behaviour.Hence google is feeling a heat from facebook who is having an eye on its advertising revenue!

The search engine giant Google is upgrading its Gmail program to add social-media tools similar to those found on Facebook. It is to note that social networking users had already rejected the Google’s revolutionary product–google wave!

Only the time will show which way the wind blows,but we can know feel the shift in ongoing latest trend where the focus is changing from only WHAT to WHO!Actually Google & other search engines are focusing mainly on WHAT the people are searching while displaying the ads,Facebook is focusing on WHO those people are by analyzing their behaviour. So facebook allows to bid on the keywords based on interest of the people,while displaying ads.It takes into consideration the behavioral aspect of the peoples by analyzing their profile information and their other activities.

So if Google succeeds in incorporating both of these WHAT and WHO features then it would be beyond any challenge that is what google is willing to do. As per now there are many hurdles in its path and the current main hurdle is Facebook.

For us at Eyebridge, Facebook has become one of the most important tools in digital marketing space. It is not only important for paid advertising but also for innovative marketing mediums like Facebook page, groups, facebook applications, facebook micro-sites and its n number of API’s. Facebook is actually now the face of social media marketing.

Google trends report clearly shows that more and more people are using Facebook as their primary on-line experience, sharing and communications tool. Also, for many web sites, the major reference site has become facebook. I think this is a very significant trend.