Com­pa­nies requir­ing basic web­sites or cus­tom web design solu­tions have quickly learned the impor­tance for their Web sites to have social media mar­ket­ing capa­bil­i­ties. One need look no fur­ther than the explo­sive growth of social media sites such as Face­book, MySpace and Twit­ter to recog­nise the poten­tial for mar­ket­ing that lies within this emerg­ing area of tech­nol­ogy. The ques­tion, how­ever, which is on the tip of every busi­ness owner’s tongue is, “What are the ben­e­fits of a social media strategy?”

The Ben­e­fits

Indi­vid­u­ally Tar­geted Adver­tis­ing — When you invest in adver­tis­ing that is placed on a social media site such as Twit­ter, MySpace or Face­book, you are not sim­ply pur­chas­ing a generic pay-per-click adver­tise­ment. Social media sites spe­cial in that the users of these sites entrust their per­sonal infor­ma­tion to the data­bases that sit behind the sites. This basi­cally means that adver­tise­ments are matched up with the selected key­words that the user has placed within their pro­file. For instance, if a user is male and has a birth date of 1971, ads that are spe­cific to his gen­der and age group will be placed on his pro­file each and every time he logs in. In terms of tar­geted mar­ket­ing, this is an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful tool because the ads that appear on an individual’s pro­file page are specif­i­cally rel­e­vant to that person.

Word-of-Mouth — Another ben­e­fit of adver­tis­ing on a social media site is word-of-mouth adver­tis­ing from the peo­ple order­ing and using your prod­ucts. In March of 2009 the aver­age num­ber of friends per Face­book user was 120. Con­sider that users post their likes and dis­likes to their pro­file on a daily basis. If they’re post­ing about your prod­uct and how amaz­ing it is, there are poten­tially 120 pairs of eyes that see the virtues of your prod­uct. When you take into account that 120 pairs of eyes look at each of the orig­i­nal 120, you can see that the num­bers begin to grow expo­nen­tially. Another com­po­nent to the idea of word-of-mouth adver­tis­ing is the amount of social influ­ence that some peo­ple have within their net­work of friends. Those who have deep influ­ence on their peers can have a tremen­dous effect upon the pop­u­lar­ity of your prod­uct or service.

Web Traf­fic, Brand Aware­ness and Global Reach — The final yet impor­tant three ben­e­fits of social media adver­tis­ing are the increase of traf­fic to your web­site, a broad cus­tomer reach and growth of your brand aware­ness. The first point is that when you have a web adver­tise­ment that is matched up to an indi­vid­ual person’s pro­file, that per­son will be more likely to actu­ally click on your ad. Pos­i­tive brand aware­ness is based on the qual­ity of your prod­uct plus the word-of-mouth adver­tis­ing you’ll receive. When users of social net­works like your prod­ucts they’ll talk about them. Remem­ber, they’re broad­cast­ing, on aver­age, to a group of 120 peo­ple or more when they do this. Finally, a basic issue that many peo­ple for­get is that the web is a global phe­nom­e­non. You will reach more peo­ple through social media than you could ever reach through other stan­dard forms of adver­tis­ing and because of the indi­vid­u­ally tar­geted nature of the adver­tis­ing these ads are more likely to work.

Adver­tis­ing within the con­text of a social media Web site is more than just a pay-per-click issue. Your Web site, which you’ve so care­fully crafted with its amaz­ing ecom­merce design, qual­ity user inter­face and rel­e­vant con­tent will sit out on the Inter­net and pull in a few vis­i­tors now and then. How­ever, if you choose to har­ness the power of adver­tis­ing within a social net­work, you’ll find that the return on invest­ment will be greater than you could have ever imag­ined. So much so, that you’ll find your­self laugh­ing all the way to the bank.

About the Author

WKWD (http://www.wkwd.com.au/ ) under­stand that beyond the mechan­ics of craft­ing an intu­itive ecom­merce design solu­tion, your mar­ket­ing strat­egy will be enor­mously ben­e­fited by cus­tom web design that keeps social media sites in mind. By inte­grat­ing and includ­ing social net­work­ing web­sites into your over­all adver­tis­ing cam­paign, you can enhance your site’s reach.

© 2009, admin. Copy­right 2009. All rights reserved.

Save

Tags: advantages, Networking, sites, social

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 12:29 am and is filed under Advertising, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.