Over the past few months there has been a major rush of advertisers heading to Facebook and throwing their marketing budget against the wall to see if they stick. (See Sponsored Crops in Famville) With Facebook becoming the most visited site, beating out Google, it seems only natural that advertisers would begin to flock. So where do you get more bang for your buck? Search engines or social media sites?

Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of advertising on Facebook:

Advantages:

• Ability to display advertising to your target market based on demographics (age, sex, marital status) location, information in profile etc…
• Ability to set up Fan Pages for your company at no cost
• Provides companies with an outlet to communicate directly with current and potential customers
• News feed feature can help spread information on your business virally

Disadvantages:

• Users are not solely looking for a product or service when visiting site
• Focus of users attention is not on ads, focused on pictures, comments, games etc…
• Users are at multiple stages of the purchasing cycle and you cannot target your ads accordingly

There is no doubt Facebook can be an effective marketing tool, companies like Kenshoo and Marin would have not just announced plans to have their software manage Facebook advertising if it wasn’t. But when comparing it to search engine marketing it does not stack up.

Why?

When you head to a search engine like Google, why do you go there? You are searching for an answer, a product or service or at very least researching a product or service. You have the ability to cover multiple sections of the purchasing cycle. You ads can be displayed when a potential customer is just researching a product and you can also be visible when a potential customer is ready to make a purchase.

Let’s look as some of the advantages and disadvantages of advertising on Google:

Advantages:

• Searchers are looking for a product/service or answer
• Ads can be tailored to show at certain times of the purchasing cycle
• Easy to use interface and extensive reporting available
• Able to understand ROI and track performance easily

Disadvantages:

• Besides ad or info under organic link – limited ability to communicate with client
• Both SEO and SEM can be complicated and the average marketer does not understand
• If outsourced, SEO and SEM can become very expensive

There are many unethical SEO and SEM agencies – finding a quality one is tough

While visitors to search engines are looking for products/services or answers users on Facebook are quite different. People head to Facebook to look at pictures or their friends, stalk X-girlfriends and waste time playing Farmville and other games. People do not head to Facebook to make purchases.  With Facebook’s targeting capabilities you can show your advertisements to your exact target market. But if that user is more concerned about writing a funny wall post then they are your advertisements, is it really affective?

A combination of SEO and SEM also does quite well at driving qualified leads – think about it. A potential customer heads to a search engine and searches something related to your businesses. They then select your ad or organic listing because it was most relevant to what they were looking for.

It will be interesting to watch both search engines and social media sites evolve over the next few years. Both industries will direct compete with each other as the mainstays of internet marketing.

Justin Freid is a Paid Search and SEO Consultant based out of Philadelpia. Justin currently works as the SEM Manager at ClickEquations, a Paid Search Software company. You can follow Justin on Twitter at @Justin_Freid or ask him questions on his internet marketing forum.