SOCIAL NETWORK ADVERTISING

By Massawe Arkadi

Social network advertising, also social media targeting is a group of terms that are used to describe forms of online advertising that focus on social networking services. One of the major benefits of this type of advertising is that advertisers can take advantage of the users' demographic information and target their ads appropriately.

Social media targeting combines current targeting options (like geotargeting, behavioral targeting, socio-psychographic targeting, etc.), to make detailed target group identification possible. With social media targeting, advertisements are distributed to users based on information gathered from target group profiles.

Social network advertising is not necessarily the same as social media advertising. Social media targeting is a method of optimizing social media advertising by using profile data to deliver advertisements directly to individual users. Social media targeting refers to the process of matching social network users to target groups that have been specified by the advertiser.

People who use social networks store various information about themselves including, but not limited to, their age, gender, interests, and location. This stored information allows advertisers to create specific target groups and individualize their advertisements. The advantage for advertisers is that their ads can reach people who are interested in the product or service. The advantage for users is that they can see ads that appeal to them. Facebook, for example, the hugely popular social network, has developed a targeting technology which allows advertisements to reach a specific audience. This is why Facebook users see advertisements on their profile page that are tailored to their gender, music taste, or location.

Operation

Within social communities users provide demographic information, interests, and images. This information is accessed by social media targeting software and enables advertisers to create display ads with characteristics that match those of social network users. The important component of social media targeting is the provision of the users’ socio-demographic and interest information. By using this information, social media targeting makes it possible for users to see advertisements that might actually interest them. The availability of user data allows for detailed analysis and reporting, which is a big part of social media targeting and what makes it more effective than statistical projections alone.

Types of Advertising

Popular social media sites, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, offer different ways to advertise brands. Facebook gives advertisers options such as promoted posts, sponsored stories, page post ads, Facebook object (like) ads, and external website (standard) ads. To advertise on Twitter there are promoter tweets, trends, and promoted accounts that show up on users newsfeeds. For advertising on YouTube there are branded channels, promoted videos, an in video advertising.

In July 2015, during their Q2 earnings call, Facebook revealed that it achieved $2.9B in mobile revenue, amounting to over 76% of its overall quarterly revenue. A large portion of this revenue was from app install ads, of which developers buy on a Cost per Install basis.