Advertising and Social Media

Social media has come a big way especially in the year 2012, it saw one of the biggest booms. Many companies simply used the social media networking sites as a platform to advertise their products, business and services. Many businesses have even profited from social media marketing more than traditional ads and radio spots.

Nowadays the print ads and billboards have lost the charm that they once had, and now businesses are forced to think more in the lines of online advertising in a rather creative and effective way. This includes content marketing, storytelling (brand building) and of course social media networking and its influences. "People are just not looking at banner ads," as Francisco Diaz- Mitoma told a leading newspaper. In fact storytelling has become the next catchphrase and paradigm of advertising.

One needs to be able to create and distribute durable content on the internet, and social media networking enables just that. Once an advertiser or business has created a piece of information that is so very engaging and compelling, it cannot be used in a regular ad, it needs to be on the internet and the easiest way to get it online is via social media networking.

Ads have now become heavily content based, and using a heavy content based ad on a newspaper or in any traditional ad format is simply costly and time consuming, there is now a shift from traditional promos. It is the social media networking sites that offer business with a unique ability to design specifically targeted ads and ad campaigns that can be customized according to their audience and specific target groups. Also each social media network has its own different and unique style of advertising, thus giving businesses a wide range of choices.

In some networks businesses can buy ads, recommend ads, partner messages, sponsorships and all of these can be targeted at specific professionals or different demographics. "LinkedIn enables marketers to drive results by nurturing meaningful relationships with its members,” says Fenot Tekle, who handles Corporate Communications at LinkedIn. "It's the only place on the Web where marketers can engage such high-quality audiences, with relevant content, in the appropriate context."

There also is Facebook which offers great opportunity for advertisers to spread their message to the right audiences. Apart from display ads, there are other social ads and other advertising options that show up in the news feeds of the users’

"News feed ads are effective because they're in the stream of the reader. They're reading the news feed, and these ads are in the stream of the news feed. They just happen to be a brand."

Also Facebook gives its advertisers the option to market various apps through their mobile site and also helps them target their ads to an existing customer base. With time the ad offerings of Facebook is all the more likely to increase, as it already has a rather rich information on its ever growing user base, and each of these users spend an significant time on the site and with the ads that are posted!