With Facebook offering greater choices for social ads and Twitter relaunching its business page, Charlie Ardagh, founder and CEO of PropelAd, looks at socially validated advertising and the four main factors driving it.
It started with a new post-bubble era full of optimism, openness and hope, where entrepreneurs could create businesses with significant social impact, without the need for lots of start-up capital.
Out of those early years of social network development, a kind of Darwinian evolution occurred leaving us with the likes Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, all of which have become household names.
Quickly following this rise was a new type of advertising, which seamlessly integrated itself into social and created a new way for advertisers to get their message out there for a fraction of the cost. While that may be the obvious reason, there are four main factors that have driven social advertising.
Social Stands Toe To Toe With Traditional Mass Media
The biggest difference between traditional and social mass media is that social can harness the power of people and determine what the audiences like. TV continues to be based on views that may or may not be the set demographic your brand is chasing. Fewer still may actually engage with the content flickering in front of their eyes, with hardly any capable of interacting with the content through what is still a passive medium.
On the other hand, social networks are free and will continue to be so for users well into the future. These networks and their influence in society have grown massively, becoming integral to the advertising community who is paying more capital to capture an active and engaged demographic.
While this is happening, there is a battle for ad budgets, be it trying to divert small business ad spend away from paid search into social, or away from TV into social. What social networks have over TV is the ability advertisers have to “try before you buy”. We are seeing more advertisers pay attention to the new metrics of “socially validated advertising.”
In other words, unlike TV where an advertiser must pay significant amounts to create, produce, and air a TV commercial before it can get feedback, advertisers can access very significant and highly targeted sample audiences on social networks for free.
Accessible Social Analytics & Targeting
Large brands will always want and require agency support. These social networks are attractive to advertisers of all sizes because, for example, Facebook offers very in-depth analysis of the page’s posts for free via Insights.
Third-party services deliver to advertisers a range of added value perspectives that many social networks offer directly. Be it the ability to benchmark one company against another to understand the competitive landscape, or to understand which content strategy is working best.
Also, they have been able to capture what is practically free social network data, producing deeper insights for advertisers at a fraction of the cost of traditional media, especially when compared to BARB data in the UK for TV for example.
In terms of paid promotions, analytics tools can equip advertisers to make data-driven decisions at a low cost, and decide on what they should be spending their money on “promoting”. This kind of approach can have a dramatic impact on the value for money achieved with socially validated advertising.
Greater Choice
Unlike TV and other traditional mass media – where ad formats have been the same for 60 years – we see new formats and smarter, more integrated messaging techniques constantly emerging.
The social networks have a significant attraction for advertisers in their capacity to innovate rapidly. Almost all of them now offer a range of “promoted” ad formats, which play a key part in their business strategy.
So, while it’s free to each significant sectors of your audience and more if you have really engaging content, it’s also possible to pay to promote content so that a greater number of people will be exposed to your message. Each format is equally measureable, traceable and defensible as an advertising vehicle down to the cost of a click, impression or conversion.
Since last year when Sponsored Stories were launched by Facebook, there has been steady growth and the market is reacting well to this new model. For instance, PropelAd track the promotion activity of sample of circa 3,000 pages and we’ve seen a 4x increase in monthly numbers of posts promoted when comparing November 2012 to March 2013.
As advertisers further embrace the idea of promoting their content, much can be gained in terms of effective costs of advertising. By paying to amplify the most engaging posts with high viral potential, advertisers can deliver reach from campaigns that is above and beyond what they are paying for directly.
ROI Is Essential
Content for social media can be produced and created at a relatively low cost and the level of engagement it generates can be measured easily. Only then should advertisers get out their cheque books to double down on what they know works and gets the engagement, conversions and attention they need, and justify boosting this essentially earned media with paid media support. Much smarter than the significantly more expensive and time-consuming “pay and spray” telly model any day!
The Web 2.0 era of entrepreneurs who developed these now gigantic social networks have essentially employed a freemium advertising proposition. A methodology that lets advertisers ask their target market what they want before spending money trying to promote an offer or message to a wider and more expensive audience. Therefore enabling advertisers to socially validate their ad spend before wasting any of it.
Charlie Ardagh is the founder and CEO of PropelAd, a provider of Facebook ads and analytics services for promoted posts. Based in Dublin, Ireland, the PropelAd team operate Facebook PMD (Preferred Marketing Developer) accredited products, and serve well-known brands such as RedBull, Western Digital and OmniCom Media.
