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While Facebook usage has seen explosive growth, scant research has explored returns on advertising dollars marketers invest in this emerging medium. Our two-stage study of 18- to 25-year-old college students suggests that many of the advertising dollars consumer goods firms spend on Facebook are likely wasted. This study highlights that, in addition to staying in touch with friends and relatives, Facebook users are primarily motivated by three desires: (1) to voyeuristically peer into others’ lives, (2) to create a distinctive identity for themselves, and (3) to act on their inner narcissistic tendencies. These motivations also make them poor prospects for advertisers, as users seem disinterested in Facebook ads and disengaged from marketers’ attempts to build brands. Herein, we discuss challenges for marketers, as well as opportunities for building brands and driving sales via Facebook.

Marketers interested in connecting with existing and potential customers are likely to find the descriptive statistics of Facebook highly attractive: 750 million active users with 94 million from the United States alone, half of whom log on every day (Burbary, 2011). Investors also seem impressed: Facebook has raised $1.5 billion in capital with the help of Goldman Sachs, it generated $2 billion in revenue for 2010, and it is reportedly worth $50 billion (Rusli, 2011). This online behemoth has triggered societal change, and not just in the way marketers reach their customers. In 2009, Fortune magazine suggested that Facebook is taking over our lives (Hempel & Kowitt, 2009). By 2010, together with texting and Twitter, Facebook emerged as a principal way by which informal communication occurs among peers; even independent bloggers have begun migrating to this social network in search of interested eyeballs (Kopykoff, 2011). The prospect of capturing a share of 770 billion page visits, half of which come from users aged 18 to 34, is understandably irresistible to many marketers (Burbary, 2011). However, it remains unknown whether the dollars advertisers invest in Facebook are well spent. While much is written about pages that garner a lot of ‘likes’ and fans, the extant literature is mostly silent regarding Facebook's effectiveness as an advertising medium and the strategic challenges of managing the complex marketer-Facebook user relationship. As such, there are very few practical implications for marketers interested in connecting with current and potential customers and building brands via Facebook. This article presents findings from a two-stage exploratory study of Facebook usage behaviors among 18- to 25-year-old college students and aims to address this knowledge gap. Based on these students’ voices, we traced individuals’ motivations driving their Facebook usage and identified the key challenges for marketers interested in employing Facebook as a medium for building brands and driving sales. We also develop a propositional inventory to aid future research, and propose practical implications for harnessing Facebook's power. While Facebook is astonishingly popular, we learned that almost no advertising works on the 18- to 25-year-old demographic, which represents 26% of all users: approximately 50 million in the United States and 188 million worldwide (Burbary, 2011). This segment accesses Facebook not just to connect with familiar people on their own terms but also to indulge in their voyeuristic, narcissistic, and exhibitionist tendencies. These users often multitask while on Facebook and are, thus, disinterested in cognitive engagement with advertisements. Furthermore, high-intensity Facebook users create their own content to promote themselves and utilize Facebook as their personal TV channel to broadcast details of their lives. As such, they compete effectively with marketers having similar intents. This strong emotional involvement is characterized by a willful suspension of disbelief whereby factual information about brands is labeled as intrusive and irrelevant. The present challenge for marketers entails engaging Facebook users who are tone-deaf to advertising, deeply skeptical, and largely disinterested in building a relationship with marketers. Effective engagement is more likely, we propose, when marketers take the following steps. First, marketers must come to terms with individuals’ motivations driving their Facebook usage and the challenges these present. Second, they must learn to work with users to jointly produce entertaining, emotion-laden content with voyeuristic, titillating value. Third, they must help users satisfy not only their need to connect with others, but also their deep-seated need to brand themselves and broadcast their online identities to social network friends.

It is unclear if advertisers flocking to new social network media are attuned to the complexities of the Facebook-user relationship or if they are aware of the significantly new technological capabilities they must develop to harness Facebook's power to brand and drive sales. Our study makes a contribution to this field by not only highlighting some of the key challenges, but also identifying new opportunities for thinking and action. We studied a narrow demographic of 18- to 25-year-old college students and drew inferences from exploratory qualitative data. We aimed to stimulate new thinking and research, and to speak to the practical realities of marketers struggling with branding on Facebook. Caution should be exercised before implementing our inferences, as considerable testing across a wider demographic sample in multiple settings is clearly necessary before generalizable insights can emerge.