Facebook's Ad Chief: We Have More Primetime Eyeballs Than All Major TV ...

Michael Seto / BIAs we've told you in the past, both Twitter and Facebook are competing strenuously for the advertising dollars marketing clients have traditionally spent on television.

Twitter's argument lies in the fact that an increasingly distracted TV audience uses its service to discuss what they're watching in real-time.

Facebook's argument is even stronger, according to vp/global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson.

Whereas Twitter hopes to win advertising dollars by making itself an integral part of the television-watching experience, Facebook believes the sheer size of its user base makes it a TV-sized mass medium all by itself.

In comments made at the Smarter Mobile Marketing (SM2) conference in New York, Everson said that as many as 100 million Americans log in to Facebook every night between 8 and 11 p.m., an audience she said is larger than the one that watches primetime television on all of the major networks - combined.

By comparison, the eight biggest broadcast networks and five biggest cable networks averaged a combined 44 million viewers in primetime last week. That's only half the number of people who logged into Facebook during the coveted timespan.

Not only does Facebook now have a bigger audience than television, it can help advertisers reach more specific consumer groups.

Everson said that by combining third-party data from outside partners with its own massive trove of information, Facebook can show a car ad to someone it knows will be in the market for a sedan in the next six months because his or her lease is coming to an end.

'We are talking about Facebook now as an evolution because of the amount of scale we have built and the fact that we can have targeted reach,' Everson said. 'Those are very important terms to a marketer.'

SEE ALSO: Facebook is taking steps to more accurately measure its ad campaigns