Social Media Advertising & Marketing
Social media is the next frontier in Internet advertising. As social networks increase in popularity and more niche segments begin to utilize the major social networks, social media and social networks are becoming the prime place to advertise, and have a lower barrier of entry for new advertisers. Social networking advertising allows you to target your customers with specificity never before possible and allows you a very high level of control you simply cannot find in traditional advertising, tv, or even search engine marketing.
Social Network Advertising versus Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing and social network marketing have two slightly different objectives. In search engine marketing, you are trying to find people who are interested in your products or services based on what they are looking for at that specific time. Social network marketing on the other hand, focuses on the demographics and interests of the people. For example, you sell a cooking gadget. On the search engines you would target people looking for cooking gadgets, or maybe recipes, or some other broad criteria. However, on a social network like Facebook you can instead find people who have specified "cooking" as an interest or who have a job in the food industry – and can even specify age and gender demographic depending on your specific product. So what is the difference? On the search engine, you cannot necessarily be sure of what they mean by their keyword search, and they may only be interested in cooking for that one search. With our Facebook example above, however, we know that this individual is interested in cooking quite frequently and we can target that individual multiple times, regardless of what they are searching for or doing on Facebook. Just like in real life, people will window shop and have different focuses at different times. On Facebook, we can target our advertising towards the most likely candidate based on them as a person, instead of their possibly one-time search criteria.
How does advertising on Social Media and Social Network work? There are many avenues to consider such as creating content on a particular social network or creating a profile on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. This is one starting point you should consider. If you do not yet have a presence on the major social networks, then you should consider my Facebook Page and Twitter services. Even without a social media presence within the network, you can still optimize the social networks as an advertising platform for your traditional web presence and web site. Similarly to search engines, you can use pay-per click (PPC/CPC) or pay-per view (PPV/CPM) strategies to show unobtrusive, relevant text ads. Instead of specifying search keywords, you can analyze demographics and keywords that will most effectively market your product.
For example, one of the sites I operate, CollegeClothes.net listed products for many different colleges. I can target current students and alumni of Ohio State between the ages of 18-30 with ads specific to OSU merchandise as opposed to simply advertising the general site to every college student in the country or only people searching for OSU merchandise on search engines. Social media networking allows for very specific targeting in order to avoid wasting time and budget on less likely sales conversions.
Facebook – the best choice for social media advertising
Facebook is the most popular and used social networking platform in the United States. Facebook also collects a lot of user demographic and keyword information, making it a great platform for niche, specialty products, and localized advertising. This information and targeting potential is unmatched by other social networks or even search engine giants like Google. With Facebook, you can also advertise in many unique ways: You can not only advertise your traditional website or Facebook Page, but can also advertise a specific event listed on Facebook, application, or group. This allows you to focus on time sensitive advertising, and to enjoy the social networking effect. For example, you create an event for a sale at your store on Facebook, you can then advertise the event directly, instead of directing people to your website or page. When interested people click your ad, they can sign up to attend the event, and when they do, all of that person's friends will also see that they are not attending the event – which results in additional, free advertising. Facebook advertising is best combined with a Facebook Page because you can easily capture new fans of your store and product. The small price to acquire a fan can result in a great return because they are now engaged in your business and can follow your business, posts, and more. In addition, because of the power of the second degree (in relationships) your fan's friends are more likely to discover your business, at no additional cost.
There are many innovative strategies and techniques for advertising on Facebook and other social networks. If you are interested in learning more or have any questions, please feel free to contact me today. I am your full service web development partner, and I will work with you through every step of the process in order to help understand and manage all of your online advertising efforts. I look forward to hearing from you soon and working with you to take advantage of the social network marketing phenomena.