A year ago, who knew that Yahoo! and other sites that prospered through advertising revenues were going to get their biggest advertising competition from social networking websites? comScore Inc, a marketing research company recently published a study that showed that one of every five ads is viewed on a social networking site!

The study by comScore also showed that MySpace and Facebook delivered over 80% of the adverts delivered on social networking category.

So why is advertising on social networking sites becoming so popular? (I say getting popular because not everyone has adopted it yet).

Well, a few reasons:

• Social networking sites have a huge reach—reach that becomes viral—multiple connections are possible.
• Advertisers become participants in the “socialscape.” They are part of the conversation.
• Ads can be engaging, not static: commenting, gifts, polling… actions can be embedded into the ads.
• Friends can see other friends engaging into these opt-in ads.
• Advertisers can tell their stories in meaning, relevant, authentic ways through social media advertising.
• Social networking advertising is highly targeted, not just demographically, but more importantly, psychographically—so the advertiser’s reach is more effective.

These factors make social media advertising more cost-effective than other online advertising platforms.

Quite a few big name players are spending big bucks on social networking advertising. Isn’t it time you switched to a more lucrative form of online advertising?

Get out there!

Tags: social ads, social advertising, social media advertising

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 10:16 am and is filed under Branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.