Is Social Media Important?
The answer is YES...
Social media is fast becoming the most important aspect of promoting yourself, site or business. In the coming years it will become as important as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and probably there will be SMO (Social Media Optimisation) agencies popping up all over the world.
At SEO Digital Marketing and Intercomms Global , we have a vast amount of experience in social media, for example, three staff members have over 2,000 facebook contacts each, plus we have internal and external bloggers at our disposal. With huge social networks comes huge potential for advertisers:
Here are 5 things to know about social media advertising.
Understand your targeted social media channel – By knowing who is using which social media site, advertisers can promote their products to their targeted audience on the appropriate social site. Facebook users represent an older, more mature crowd than MySpace users, so advertisements about refinancing a home mortgage might not be the most appropriate content on MySpace.
Target the correct users with your message – Advertisements targeting users on social media channels are becoming more prevalent. There has been a lot of controversy about this content targeting on Facebook with their Social Ads. Here an advert is placed with related user actions and placed in the newsfeed for the users' friends to see. If one of our social media gurus were to change his status to say ‘Damian just bought a cool pair of red high heels’ (a company selling shoes might be targeting red high heels) might place their advert next to my status update. The company's expectation would then be that, Damian’s friends were jealous of his new shoes and need an easy place to buy themselves a pair.
Ensure the advertisements are supplementing the present content on the social site – Having Google-powered PayPerClick ads next to related lenses on Squidoo, using Yahoo to integrate advertisements with similarly tagged images on Flickr and using the Facebook social ads, place the company directly in the path of those already seeking similar information. The advertisements are just offering one more way for the users to fulfil their need. Targeting pages, images and profiles that have content about shoes or fashion with the Red High Heels advertisement doesn't seem out of place, and the user can identify with the advertised product.
Have a social networking presence – Integrating social media advertisements with social media usage is quite similar to placing PPC ads on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) next to an organically ranking website: two impressions are better than one. And because searchers seeing a brand name and PPC advert are likely to then click on the organic results for the same company, social media users could see the advertisements and search for the same company as a user on Facebook, Flickr or del.icio.us.
