On Campus, the Disruptive Facebook Flyer

If you want to know how the working world is going to use new technology in coming years, check out how college students are using it now. That's the idea behind this feature of the blog, called Dispatches From the Next Generation. We found a few students who are good at writing about the tech scene around them. They will post from time to time. This one is from Kelly Sutton of Loyola Marymount. Look to hear soon from Nicole Norfleet of the University of North Carolina and others.

By Kelly Sutton

Gone are the days of staple-ridden telephone poles. Sales of neon-colored paper stock are down. Like all things in today's world, even party flyers have gone digital--for the better.

The ubiquitous Facebook instituted flyer sales in May 2006. Campus clubs and organizations can purchase a days worth of "flyers" for five bucks. These digital flyers appear at random on the left-hand side of the screen and are rotated in with corporate ads. Facebook flyers boast higher visibility than paper flyers and are ultimately more cost effective. It's much easier for me to create and publish a Facebook flyer than to run down campus graphics, pay for paper stock, then hang them up around campus. Five dollars will buy a student 10,000 "flyers" (views) for their own school or 2,500 at any other school.

So Facebook has replaced paper flyers, big whoop. But Facebook has also opened the doors to students looking to get ahead and local businesses as well. Let's take the example of a club in Los Angeles: if they spend a total of $80 marketing a college night through Facebook flyers, potentially 50,000 students in the immediate area will at least see the flyer.

There are a few caveats of course: not every student has Facebook, not every student goes "clubbing," people ignore ads, etc. Regardless, that exposure will pay itself back if only 5 people decide to attend the hypothetical college night. Any student or organization (including those not affiliated with a school) can advertise through Facebook flyers. I've seen flyers for everything from the latest philanthropy event to condos to birthday wishes.

It's because Facebook has something no other social network or web entity has: precise geographic locations of a highly segmented customer base. Each school has its own micro-network which can be targeted with specific and relevant flyers. My peers and I ignore the shotgun-spread of corporate advertising. Facebook, on the other hand, is running a local newspaper classified system with the user base of The New York Times.

The flyers are more targeted than Google's lauded AdWords program could ever hope to be. They have more appeal than even the flashiest iPod commercial -- well, maybe not.

I tried out the flyer system a few months ago with a college-aimed blog I run. For $20, I saw my traffic increase by several factors of ten for a few days and landed a few regular readers. Not too shabby, especially for cash-strapped students. Some people have not had such luck, especially not larger corporations. GigaOM reported in February 2007 that big-name advertisers have been "universally disappointed" with flyer-style advertisement on Facebook. Because of the expectations of companies trying to push a product, the flyer feature is often downplayed or neglected for its "disastrous results." For on-campus organizations looking to get the word out about an event, it's the bee's knees.