Social Networks and Cell phones have both evolved from their raw base form and taken on new potential in the last decade. I remember when I got my first phone back in the eighth grade because I walked to and from school everyday and my parents wanted to know that I had gotten to school safely, I also remember entering the social network scene a year later when Facebook emerged and all my friends were getting them and I wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Back then with cellphones the technology was super simple they were designed to be durable, make calls and texts and take really crappy pictures.
Facebook was something that everyone was hearing about at the time of my freshman to sophomore year of high school. It was the new thing to jump on board with. It started out as a place to post statuses and photos about what was going on in your life.
The thing about mobile phones and social networks like facebook is that facebook is dependant upon the mobile phone industry to have people download their app from the Apple store or the Google play market and what happens is that they are solicited from company's that want to advertise on the facebook app, so the company's pay facebook to advertise their product. This is functionalism because it works for both the advertising party because they get advertising and facebook builds their revenue.
An excerpt from a case study called How Facebook Slew the Mobile Monster " Behind the scenes, though, Facebook was already finding its footing. From near zero last May, revenue from ads on mobile devices rocketed to $305 million in the last three months of 2012. That figure amounted to 23 percent of overall ad sales and helped lift shares back above $30 in January. "We are a mobile-first advertising company now" says Gokul Rajaram, Face-books product director for ads.
That remains debatable, but Facebook's experience provides a lesson for anyone trying to cope with the mass migration of computer users to mobile phones and tablets. What Facebook discovered is that integrating ads directly into a user's flow of natural activities -- in Facebook's case, the main feed where people view updates from friends -- works far better than banners and pop-up ads. While these so-called native ads might be controversial, they look like advertising's most successful adaptation yet to mobile computing.
A year ago, Facebook faced all the usual problems: small screens, fewer technologies to target potential customers, and gaps in marketers' ability to measure theimpact of mobile ads. These factors made ads look far less effective on mobile devices, and marketers less willing to pay for them.
Facebook's advertising team was also too preoccupied with pushing a new kind of desktop Web ad, called Sponsored Stories, to pay much attention to mobile. These ads are actions by a Facebook member, such as "liking" a page or checking in at a store, that marketers can then promote, for a fee, to the member's friends. Zuckerberg viewed these ads as the nature of Facebook advertising because real posts from friends were less likely to be ignored.
By early 2012, Facebook was ready to start running them not just in the right-hand section reserved for ads but also on its prime real estate: the news feed, where people spend most of their time on the social network. Executives knew it was a risky step -- especially when they extended the same type of ads to mobile as well. What if the ads really annoyed people?
Far from it. Sponsored Stories got more clicks. But it was the mobile versions that really took off. They got twice as many clicks and commanded nearly three times as much from advertisers as those on the desktop, according to a subsequent study by advertising agency TBG Digital. By July, the mobile ads were grossing $500,000 a day".
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