SocialMedia.com: What We Learned in Social Advertising in 2009

December 15th, 2009 by Katie Smillie

Right now the SocialMedia.com team is chugging full-steam ahead on developing the first social-advertising platform for publishers. But to continue to make killer social ads in the future, it was important for us to reflect on what happened in social advertising in 2009 and identify the most important lessons that we learned. Here they are:

  1. Trust is everything. Because social advertising brings real people and real relationships into the mix, it’s essential to preserve trust around the board. If belief in the message is removed, then the added value from social is non-existent. In the same vein, don’t pay people to say good things about you. Paying users to tweet or promote your brand reduces trust between people, and therefore reduces the value of the message.

  2. Advertising through someone’s social graph is the most influential form of marketing. In our experience the most engaging social campaigns aren’t big flashy ads, rather they are bite-sized pieces of content from real people (status updates, recommendations, shared preferences). Ads that incorporate such social messages perform better than ads that don’t. Across our campaigns the social ad (word of mouth impression) has consistently higher CTR than the non-social ad (opt-in impression). Earlier in the year we partnered with a third-party research group, Dynamic Logic, to conduct the first-ever social advertising research study. The results established that social ads perform better than their non-social counterparts with regards to purchase intent, online ad awareness, and brand favorability.

  3. Social isn’t always obvious. Social is easy to see when in the form of a simple social graph on a networking site such as Facebook or LinkedIn, in which the social relationships are one-to-one connections formed by users. But social goes well beyond that boundary. All publishers have some form of social graph.  However, it’s likely transparent. Individual readers on a site are not directly connected via friendship, but they do interact with one another and they all share similar interests and experiences.  These common interactions, interests, and experiences bind users and form an implicit social community.  Everyone in the community cares about what the rest of the community thinks, and therefore shared messages and media within the community carry additional meaning and influence.

  4. Twitter is a broadcast medium. Harvard Business research found this year that over 90% of content on Twitter is created by only 10% of Twitter users. Advertisers should discover authentic message about their brand from the 10%, and then surface and amplify those messages to the rest of millions who are listening. Other social sites are also trending towards this play, e.g. Facebook fan pages.

  5. It’s not just about the click. While social ads perform better, marketers need to look beyond CTR to user engagement activities such as share, like, recommend, tweet, and become a fan. All of these activities should be measured and weighed along with traditional marketing metrics. And, as the research showed, social ads are particularly useful for increasing purchase intent, online ad awareness, and favorability — all of these are must-have metrics for the marketer’s dashboard.

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