UPDATED 9.40am

GENERAL MOTORS HAS announced that it’s to pull $10million worth of advertising from Facebook, saying that ads on the site have little impact.

A spokesperson for the the company which, according to the New York Times is the third largest advertiser in the US (after Proctor and Gamble and AT&T), said that paid advertising on Facebook has little impact on consumers.  There are 900 million registered users of Facebook around the world.

GM will continue to use its Facebook page to market the company for free. The car maker’s head of marketing Joel Ewanick told the Wall Street Journal that GM is “reassessing” its advertising on Facebook, following concerns that paid ads on the site do not help to sell cars. Ewanick said that the content on Facebook is “effective and important”. GM spends about $30million a year on creating content for its Facebook pages.

The move by General Motors comes as Facebook prepares for its Initial Public Offering. The selling of shares on Friday is expected to raise to value of the company to over $100billion.

The results of a new poll published in the US yesterday revealed that almost half of people believe that the social networking site is just a passing fad, and that three of every five Facebook users say they have little or no faith that the company will protect their personal information.

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