While all the buzz today is about Facebook’s entry into the publicly traded realm—it’s official valuation is $104 billion—another company has made headlines about its interaction with the social media giant.

Following a meeting with Facebook officials, General Motors announced that it would drop its paid advertising on Facebook. As Reuters reports:

“GM's decision followed Facebook officials' failure to convince top marketing executives at the U.S. automaker of the benefits of Facebook's paid ads … That was after Facebook officials focused more on touting the social networking website's free pages.”

The move calls into question Facebook’s revenue model. If more companies follow GM’s lead and decide to just use the free pages that Facebook offers, then it’ll be hard to sustain huge profits. GM did say, however, that it was only testing not using Facebook ads, and it may purchase them in the future, according to the article.

GM’s biggest U.S. competition is Ford, which will continue to purchase Facebook ads, investing rather heavily in the medium. On PR Daily’s sister site Ragan.com, Matt Wilson breaks down the difference between the two brands, which can be found here.

Which one is right? Time will tell, and perhaps I’m biased, but I can’t see a modern brand succeeding if social media is ever an afterthought.

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