General Motors came back to Facebook for advertising as part of a marketing strategy on mobile applications, a year after it announced that it abandons the promotion on largest online social networking service, provoking fears that other companies will follow suit. GM advertisements on mobile applications and Facebook will promote the Chevrolet Sonic subcompact car, announced the giant American carmaker.
Facebook has introduced new tools and services to attract users and companies that want to advertise their products on the social networking site.
GM’s decision in May last year to abandon Facebook advertising caused investor fears that other big companies will follow suit. GM wanted bigger ads on Facebook, but Facebook declined. At that point, GM decided to pull the ads altogether, as they had “little impact on consumers’ car purchases.”
The return of GM to Facebook highlights the efforts of the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to bring companies on Facebook to promote their services on mobile devices.
“We’ve had an ongoing dialogue with GM over the last twelve months and are pleased to have them back as an advertiser on Facebook,” said Adam Isserlis, a spokesman for Facebook, in an email statement. The statement reads: “We look forward to working even more closely with GM in the coming weeks and months.”
The company launched its mobile advertising platform in March 2012 to take advantage of the growing number of users accessing applications through their mobile devices. Over 60% of the 1.1 billion members access the Facebook service using their smartphones and tablets. At the end of the fourth quarter of last year, 23% of Facebook’s advertising revenues were obtained through mobile apps, compared to 14% in the third quarter.
However, Facebook is behind Google, which could attract 57% of U.S. mobile advertising market by 2015, according to eMarketer.
GM’s decision “shows one thing: Nobody can really ignore Facebook,” said Thilo Koslowski, an analyst at Gartner market analysis. He added: ” GM realizes there must be a value proposition for them to go to Facebook.”
In 2011 GM spent around $10 million for advertising on Facebook, said last year a source close to the situation.
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