ChasNote

According to research from Vitrue (via Ad Age), click-through rates on links marketers publish on their Facebook brand pages (and push into the newsfeeds of the fans of those brand pages) may run as high as 6.49%.

(Or maybe it’s only 2.12%. Vitrue’s methodology is a bit squishy: “How many fans a brand has is also a factor in calculating click-through rate — it’s the total number of clicks on a particular post divided by number of fans who would have seen it, a number that’s adjusted to take into consideration that not every fan is on Facebook all day long.”)

Whatever. Say the real CTR is 2%, that’s still about twenty times better than average banner CTRs. Probably fifty times better than the average CTR for banners on Facebook.

It’s the kind of performance improvement you expect when you build an advertising format that attempts to “go native,” to speak to customers in their own vernacular. At Facebook the vernacular is a stream of short status updates or pictures or links that my friends think I might find interesting; if a brand I’ve befriended joins the conversation with short updates or pictures or links, it just might capture my interest.

It’s the same thing we’re trying to do with Digg Ads, which rolled out in beta last week. At Digg, the vernacular is a collection of news headlines (and ledes) — organized by popularity among the Digg community — that other community members can Digg, bury or read/watch in full (at the publisher’s site) if they click on the blue headline. Like news updates from brands in Facebook, Digg Ads gives brands an opportunity to speak to Diggers with a local accent, which, as early beta results suggest, will inspire click-through rates that may be twenty times better than a banner ad delivers. Stay tuned.