After GM kills $10 million Facebook ad budget, Ford laughs

Yesterday, a rumor surfaced suggesting that General Motors (GM) plans to stop spending $10 million on Facebook ads, after concluding they were not influencing consumers. GM confirmed the news later in the day.

"We regularly review our overall media spend and make adjustments as needed," a GM spokesperson said in a statement. "This happens as a regular course of business and it's not unusual for us to move our spending around various media outlets – especially with the growth of multiple social and digital media outlets. In terms of Facebook specifically, while we currently do not plan to continue with advertising, we remain committed to an aggressive content strategy through all of our products and brands, as it continues to be a very effective tool for engaging with our customers."

It's amusing to see the reaction of one of GM's biggest competitors, Ford. Almost immediately, the other American automaker sent out the following message on Twitter:

It's all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.

Twitter's 140 character limit aside, Ford had more to say.

"We've found Facebook ads to be very effective when strategically combined with engagement, great content and innovative ways of storytelling, rather than treating them as a straight media buy," a Ford spokesperson said in a statement. "We continue to have a strong, collaborative relationship with Facebook, which includes first-of-a-kind vehicle reveals, advertising and innovative ways of sharing content. Our engineers have also been working with Facebook engineers to develop unique and safer ways of integrating the car experience with Facebook."

Ford has been a loud supporter of Facebook marketing for quite some time. Most recently, the company was one of the first to pay for Facebook's new logout ads. The automaker has also been working closely with the social networking giant to figure out how to integrate Facebook into Ford Sync.

Ford and GM have 1.5 million Likes and 378,000 Likes on their Facebook Pages, respectively.

See also:

• Facebook: where does the money come from?
• Facebook announces Offers, mobile ads
• Facebook testing seven ads per webpage
• Facebook starts displaying ads in the News Feed
• Over half of Facebook users respond to social media marketing
• Women more likely than men to click on Facebook ads