Pros and cons of Social Media Advertising (SMA)

Posted on | January 19, 2010 | View Comments

Social Media Advertising spend is growing rapidly, whilst others traditional online (if you can call it that ) is on the decrease. According to Neilsen AdRelevance, social media advertising has risen by 812%, 364% and 184% in Entertainment, Travel and Business to Business industries respectively . Travel and Business to Business has seen a decrease of spend on other forms of online advertising by 11% and 8% respectively.

Hardware and electronics have seen the 47% cuts on other online advertising, biggest in percentage, although social media advertising has risen by 56%.  So harware stores like Halfords and B&Q prefer to advertise on Facebook and LinkedIn as oppose to ITV.com and  Guardian.co.uk. Below is an analysis of why we are seeing these changes and why social media advertising is becoming so

Pros of SMA:

1. Social Media advertisements are more engaging.

Have you seen Facebook advertising? It allows you to conduct polls and get users to like your advertisement. If the user likes the advert (and clicks on the thumbs up icon), it automatically tells their friends that someone they know has endorsed the ad. It’s great way for your friends to recommend products and brands to you.

Also, if the user doesn’t find the advertisements relevant, they can click on the close button and that will stop advertisements similar to the ones displayed earlier. Saving advertisers money by targeting relevant people and making users happy about the adverts they see.

2. More targeted.

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Social Media advertisers on Facebook can target a niche, in the example I’m looking to target executve vice presidents and executive directors who live in the UK. What’s great is that it gives me an estimate on number of people in this category in real time. I can no loosen the criteria to get more people to see my campaign or vice versa.

You can target your audience by their location, age, sexuality, job roles, music genre preference, political views, books they read, authors they like, etc. That sort of pin point accuracy is very hard to achieve on other sites and even search engines.

3. Larger communities for large campaigns.

Social networks have a larger audience than most of the other sites. This is fantastic, if the mission of your advertisement is brand awareness. For example if you are looking to target corporate or business owners, it might strike you that LinkedIn has 5.4million active members versus other business publications with an online presence.For instance WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal) has 3million, Forbes.com 2.9million and BusinessWeek 1.3million. If you are looking to target a wider audience (niche or generic), sites like LinkedIn provide you with a huge opportunity.

4. Social media are the search engines of tomorrow.

As the search engine market is maturing, users are increasingly realising that most sites on the front two pages are highly optimised sites. Mainly owned by large publications, who pay a lot to get on the front two pages of major search engines. It doesn’t work for them when they are looking to get opinions on ‘How to get a graduate job’, ‘Which car to buy’ etc. They need forums  and real user feedback on questions they ask. Social Media allows users to achieve that as a conversation and not a broadcast as forums, groups, blogs etc.

5. Better User Experience.

Social Media’s success is based on good online technology coupled with intuitive usability, making lives simpler for the end user. We usually find social media easier to use than the average software or website. Less clutter and making sure the user is happy, this is the reason why you don’t require a manual to use social networking sites. Better user experience also means that punters are more informed, for instance they know the advertisement areas on the site and if they are interested, they would follow the adverts through. Some websites disguise the advertising areas and as a result users click on it, to realise that they have been redirected to another site.

Another aspect to it is connecting Facebook advertisements to your corporate Facebook Pages. Many users on clicking an advertisement want to stay on the same platform, typically on clicking on an advert, on search engine you go to a new website for which you might need to register or login. With Facebook you can develop a page and have a related advertisement on the site. It’s a great way to get user engagement and brand awareness.

Cons of Social Media Advertising

1. SMA is Interrupted Advertising.

Most social media sites like Myspace, YouTube, Bebo etc have advertisements which are placed around profiles, inbox, multimedia pages etc. As a busy user the chances are that you overlook the adverts are high. On the flip side sites like Myspace where advertisements include flashy banners, distracts users from their social networking experience, causing anger and frustration. Hence I often think of some social networking sites as experts in interrupted advertising, more often than not, users ignore them.

2. Timing of Advertisement.

Search engines are great for advertising because generally when you are looking for a product or a service you go on to a site like Google and type to find typical costs, suppliers, best practices etc. When it comes to social networks the chances are that advertisements are not relevant to you at the time, even though you are the right demographic.

Unfortunately social media sites won’t be able to put advertisements on their searches as Overture Inc. a paid search specialist pioneered the bid-for-placement mechanism. In July 2001, the US patent office issued Overture a patent for the mechanism.Patent 6,269,361; also known as the ’361 patent, essentially covered all AdWords like business models.

Conclusion

Looking at all the pros and cons of social network advertising, my conclusion is that we have just seen the tip of the iceberg. Social networking is barely 8 years old and SMA even younger. There are new platforms like Spotify popping up who are revolutionising the way we advertise and engage with audience on social media. Facebook is certainly the leader in innovative social network advertising, I’m sure we’ll see much more from them in the coming years.

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