New & Improved Social Media Advertising

Social Media is now one of the most profitable resources through which you can reach consumers. That is, is someone knows how to maintain it. This is very different from recent years of profitable advertising. I am going to discuss why these tactics are used now and how they are different than previous years. 

For affective advertising it is important to have user participation and social media allows you to do this.  Users can now comment, share, ask questions, etc., to interact with the company and make their voice be heard. This leads into the next point. 

Companies need to take more of an active role in their social media rather than just simply placing advertisements on the web, to be the most effective. 

Making it possible for users to comment, share, ask questions, etc., means that companies will also have to listen to what consumers are saying. If a handful of consumers are all asking or saying similar things about a companies product, businesses must listen and answer/take comments into consideration. If businesses do not listen to users comments, this will not make consumers happy and will make them feel as if the company does not care about their consumers or even make them turn away from the product.  

A downside to online marketing is all of the constant ads popping up in your news feeds. It irritates consumers when 90% of their new feed are advertisements and only 10% are personal interests, even if the products are things that the user is interested in.  

Another way social media advertising is different from old advertising ways is the fact that you can interact more. Instead of old advertising, like watching a commercial on tv, you can view and comment on products that other people can also view and comment, and people are allowed to feed off of each other's comments. 

Social media has been said to have made our attention spans shorter. This means, when advertising on social medias, the point of the ad needs to be seen and understood quickly. It needs to catch the consumers eye and make them stop and take the time to look at it while scrolling down their news feed.

Another factor of social media advertising is that businesses can not just put their advertisements on social media sites and be done with it. They need to see how affective their advertisements were and feed off them in one direction or another, whether the results were good or bad. 

More traditional advertising was not able to tell what kind of people were viewing their advertisements. Social media allows companies, to a certain degree and for a fee, to know the name and details of every customer that interacts with them. This allows companies to advertise in a whole new way, sending ads your way that you are actually interested in. 

Another aspect of social media marketing is that an ad that is made to go on twitter, would not work as affectively on Facebook. For the companies, this means that they need different advertisements for different social media accounts and that is where I, a designer, come in!! 

Although social media advertising has come so far and is being very affective, it has some flaws. The goal of my blog posting is that people that are in marketing see it and try to take some of my thoughts into consideration, and maybe, just like advertisements, social media marketing can be edited. I want to know what you think about social media marketing. Do you love it? Do companies need to cut back a little bit? Or would you suggest to stop social media marketing? I would love to hear your opinions. 

Until next time bloggers,

Kels