Improvements Made in Social Network Marketing
One of the biggest things that I tell my clients is that buying advertising on social networking websites is overpriced and worthless if you have a niche product.
MySpace charges obscene amounts of money for their advertising that is largely not targeted. Their advertising setup is mostly based on typical demographics: location, gender, sexual preference, and age. Now the inclusion of sexual preference may have thrown some people off, but myspace bases their ads for personal sites on that listing. Last year I had a friend of mine that was gay and asked me about what ads I got when I signed off of myspace, I told him that is was usually a True ad or another type of dating site, usually with a hot girl. He told me that he was seeing ads for gay dating sites, obviously based of his selection of sexual preference on his profile.
Back to the point, MySpace and other social networking sites don’t dip into the wealth of information that people provide them on their page. (Google Adsense does to a certain point, but that is a different type of way to advertise on MySpace completely.) This ads to the value of setting up targeted viral campaigns on these sites, because as a user you can do the keyword searching yourself. You are able to gain the data from social networking sites that you need to use in order to promote your product.
All this is about to change with the announcement that Facebook is designing a keyword based advertising system for their site. Allowing advertisers to target users based on what is on their profile. Facebook is running studies to see how receptive users are going to be to direct advertising:
Next year, Facebook hopes to expand on the service, one person says,
using algorithms to learn how receptive a person might be to an ad
based on readily available information about activities and interests
of not just a user but also his friends — even if the user hasn’t
explicitly expressed interest in a given topic.
In the article Zachary Rodgers comments saying that machine based advertising is not going to be the end all and be all. That just because people list a certain movie in their movies section, that they aren’t necessarily going to be interested in buying that movie on DVD or something along those lines. I have to say I disagree with that assessment, this type of advertising is leaps and bounds above what is currently offered by social networking websites. Targeting an interest is much more valuable than blanket ringtone advertising or offering up a dating site with an attractive female just because I am a straight male. Facebook is on the right path to developing a much more effective system than the one that exists.
Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, advertising, adsense, target marketing
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