GM to pull Facebook ads
updated 12:33 pm EDT, Wed May 16, 2012
Car giant has little faith in Facebook advertising
General Motors has announced that it will cease advertising on Facebook, Agence France-Presse reports. The move could signal trouble for Facebook, which is currently attempting to allay prospective stockholder concerns in the run-up to its initial public offering.
GM is the third-largest advertiser in the US, spending about $1.8 billion on advertising in 2011. The auto giant's paid Facebook advertising budget has been around $10 million , while the car maker has spent about $30 million on unpaid marketing on the social network. A GM spokesperson said that the company will continue to push content on GM's product and brand Facebook pages, but paid ad operations will cease.
The loss of GM's advertising business could prove to be something of a black eye for Facebook. The social network has been testing and proposing a number of new features as it prepares to go public, including paid post promotion and mobile ads. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that the company will, in the future, focus more heavily on mobile advertising as a means of driving revenues, but for now Facebook lags far behind Google in the mobile advertising sphere.
