Social Media Advertising
Benjamin Franklin printed the first American magazine ads in 1742. The first convention of advertising agents was held in 1873. In 1999, Internet advertising broke the $2 billion mark. And in 2007, Facebook launched advertising into the social media age with the first attempt at social media advertising in the form of brand pages.
Today, social media ad revenue is estimated as an $8.4 billion industry, and predictions say it’s only going to get bigger. So how has a market that didn’t even exist only a decade ago grown so large? Better yet, why is it so much more effective than email marketing, broadcast and print advertising, and other past advertising initiatives?
Let’s break this down. Social media advertising is unlike any other past form of advertising because it is the first two-way street advertising method. Before, customers would listen to ads on the radio, watch them on television, or flip through them in the pages of their newspapers and magazines. Social media ads allow feedback from the audiences they target in the form of likes, shares, comments, reblogs, retweets, etc. In this digital age, there are actually three main reasons why social media advertising stands above all past advertising initiatives.
Advanced Targeting Options
First and foremost, social media advertising allows for the most advanced targeting options the ad industry has ever encountered. There is Interest Targeting, where a company can target audiences by their interests and skills. There is Behavioral Targeting, which is when brands use peoples purchase behaviors, intent, or devices used to target ads. Custom Targeting is when advertisers can actually upload a specific list to target, including emails, phone numbers and social media user IDs. Finally, Lookalike Targeting is when you target new fans that are very similar to the ones you already have. Being able to target audiences with such specific parameters, based in fact on the users own shared information via their social media platform, is an advertisers dream. No more guessing trends or making risky predictions…the information to target ads appropriately is all right here on social media, we just have to tap into it. How much information do you have available on your social media accounts? Do you think this is information advertisers can you to their advantage?
Improved Conversion Tracking
Long before social media advertising, it was practically an impossible task to accurately measure the success of a single ad among your actual targeted audience. There were too many outlying variables that could effect your data. It was like stepping up to the plate to bat with a blindfold on; you just kept swinging until you got a hit. Some social media ads function off of something called conversions, which basically means that the ad did what it was supposed to do. If you have an ad for an app download, the conversion is how many people actually downloaded your app. Social media ads let you track this exact number, as well as who performed this action and in what time frame. It’s almost frightening how much advertisers can know about us, isn't it?
Mobile Dominance
Along with the rise of social media came the birth of the smart phone in all it’s glory. 60% of all smartphone activity in the is digital media time in the U.S. This basically means mobile users are already present on social media, so why not take this gift of having your audience already looking at a social media platform and push ads toward them? This is definitely not rocket science.
Final Thoughts
In summary, social media advertising offers businesses the opportunity to build brand awareness, target audiences with extreme precision, and helps to find new potential clients using a users’ own shared information. All of these feats were nearly impossible for advertisers to accomplish before the advent of social media advertising, even with a magic wand and a fairy godmother. There’s really no question then as to why social media advertising has exploded the way it has. With new users joining social media platforms daily, the profitability and effectiveness of social media advertising it will only continue to increase.
This post is the first in a series of posts on social media advertising. Stay tuned to learn about social media advertising on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest & Instagram!
As always, think about the questions I've asked and comment down below! I'd love to hear what you have to say about this series!
Facts from adage.com, marketingland.com, & adweek.com
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