Think Tank: Facebook - from social to commercial - Telegraph Meanwhile, news bubbled up around the launch of the network's Client Council, a star chamber of advertisers helping to optimise Facebook's utility to brand owners. There have also been social media boot-camps conducted for the likes of Diageo. Right now, both fashion and momentum are with Facebook - only recently, consumer giant Reckitt Benckiser committed to driving down TV's share of its marketing budget from four-fifths to half. Facebook's virtual monopoly ensures it will secure not just the lion's share of social media revenues but also shape how those are captured and - more generally - how brands and consumers rub along on a site that began as a social space and is now set to become progressively commercial. Facebook is obliged to manage that transition from a pure user focus with maximum lightness of touch. Making its service more responsive to the needs of the advertiser without upsetting the apple cart is business-critical. Research, albeit of the type best taken salted, suggests that more than a quarter of Facebook's users will leave the site if there is too much advertising. Consumers are quick to "unlike" or "unfriend" brands that tread too clumsily in their social space - and the host brand itself is equally vulnerable to this kind of dissent. The site currently promotes its precision advertising powers in the quite literal form of a target (and arrow), a symbol that I suspect may change. No one likes to think of themselves as a target, not least in a space they use to convene with friends and family. Facebook's growth as an advertising and brand-building platform has one other, less visible but no less important handbrake - the relatively slim body of evidence that budgets work as hard for advertisers here as they do in traditional media. This may just reflect the site's relative infancy, of course, or the largely experimental ways in which brands have used the space to date. But there is also growing evidence that building brands in social media may be more problematic and less profitable than some hoped. Brands such as Coca-Cola, for example, have built fan sites on Facebook. But recent data from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute suggests that only 1pc (or less) of even these "big brand" fans are actively engaged in any kind of conversation with the brand. More damningly, perhaps, an overlooked IBM study from last year reported "significant gaps between what businesses think consumers care about and what consumers say they want from their social media interactions with companies." Top of the consumers" wish list? Not to "engage," as businesses hope, but instead to receive discounts. Only 22pc cite "being part of a community" as a reason for interacting with companies via social sites. The report also confirmed "the advocacy paradox" - that consumers who typically engage with a brand in social media will already have an affinity for that brand or company. Viewed through this lens, it would be easy, if a little premature, to conclude that a brand's presence and profile on Facebook, and in social media generally, is a better measure of its popularity than a driver of it. Indeed, the academics at Ehrenberg-Bass remind us that few people love brands but instead buy from a repertoire, and that brands in fact grow by getting more irregular buyers to buy them. The odds, then, are stacked against attempts to increase the reach of a brand simply by nurturing its existing fan base. So although social media can be used in many different ways, not just to engage fans - as Facebook's recent product initiative demonstrates - a prior conclusion from Ehrenberg-Bass might serve most advertisers well: "Whilst not trendy to do so, it is OK to be sceptical and to start slow." Whether that is quick enough for Facebook to make its numbers is another question.