Science & Technology

Advertising in social networks has long been popular with advertisers, and now developers are forced every day to offer them more and more new features in a race to trap better chunk of the market. And the lead is again taken by the social networking site Facebook that is testing a new algorithm for real time targeted advertising.

The real time targeted ads algorithm will mean that the system will display the ads depending upon the ongoing conversation and status updates. For example if someone from Facebook users posts “I am thinking of a pizza dinner”, almost immediately he will see on his screen the ads displaying pizza restaurants, for example Domino’s Pizza.

So the next time you will have to think twice what you post or chat with your friends as the words in your text could be used to target your ‘pocket’ by making you buy the products related to what you say.

This is not the first time that the internet companies are using the targeted ads as in the case of already existing Facebook ads and Google’s Gmail, but the real time ads system has never been tried before that is quite capable of drifting the users’ attention during ongoing conversations.

As reported by marketing news site Advertising Age, this trial is already being conducted on about six million users, without mentioning the criteria for selection of subjects.

Experts believe that such an innovation is a good opportunity for advertisers to target the potential customers, but on the other hand – Facebook will have to monitor the number of such advertisements, so as not to alienate their own users.