Social networks have changed the web forever. Anyone can express themselves, connect with old friends, keep in touch with distant friends, and maintain their own peice of the internet. Debate continues about the value of this freedom to self publish our lives online – but irrespective of the real value within social networks, they do offer advertisers a great opportunity.
What are the big social networks advertisers should consider?
These are some of the biggest social networks:
Want the full picture of all the social networks available? Try Visual representation of global social networking market share and http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=114 (this is old – FaceBook has definately won more market share)
Why are social networks a valuable advertising platform?
When you interact with users on social networks you interact with real people that have legitimate identities. You are able to profile your audience very specifically – paying to display your advertising to a sub section of the entire social network user base that best represents your target customer. For example, FaceBook will display the exact size of the audience you are targeting as you refine the profile and interests of your targeted customer (e.g.: males between 18 and 35 in South Africa who are interested in Rugby).
Besides pay pay click advertising on social networks, there is also the possiblity of creating free exposure for your business by introducing an application that is embedded within the social network. If the application enriches the users experience, viral word of mouth marketing will take care of the rest.
Types of applications & integration with social networks
Google’s OpenSocial is a open standards set of tools that are supported by many of the large social networks, including LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, and Plaxo. OpenSocial allows developers to create seamless transtitions between their own applications and these social networks. FaceBook uses its own set of standards, and developers can choose to build an application that can be embedded within a users FaceBook page or a completely independant website can be built that interacts remotely with FaceBook using FaceBook Connect. FaceBook Connect offers the ability to leverage an existing FaceBook profile to serve as the user account on your own website. Some of the benefits? The name will be real and the user doesn’t have to go through a laborious registration process – by providing their FaceBook username and password your website can access all of their profile details.
Social network application guidelines
Some valuable social network application guidelines are provided here. The bottom line is this: if your business wants to introduce a FaceBook (or other social media) application – it must enrich the user experience. Users will not install an application because it’s there – it will need to offer a valuable utility to the user and make the entire FaceBook experience all the better. Furthermore, the application should leverage the fact that it is embedded within a social network. Applications should allow users to share, interact, and grow their digital relationship with each other.
by Sean Riley
Do Business said,
19 September 2008 @ 8:13 am
Google has thrown down the gauntlet to Facebook with plans to compete with the social network hugely popular software development platform. Do Business
Wayne said,
19 September 2008 @ 8:55 am
Thanks again for a great article Sean,
The facebook application we developed recently for Yellow Pages was a real learning curve for us especially with regards to the whole social networking environment from a technical perspective.
Our timing for developing the application was a little unlucky as facebook had just launched the “new facebook” with its own set of development rules and parameters to that of the “old facebook”. Due to this fact, all development guidelines and examples still deal only with the “old facebook” making the development of a “new facebook” compliant application a process of trial and error in totaldarkness.
Luckily though, the application we developed wasn’t too complicated so we didn’t need to do too much FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that we need to do.
In the end it was quite fun though and really fullfilling to see my app running on facebook for all my friends to see.
Matan said,
22 September 2008 @ 9:21 am
One thing I always wanted to know, regarding ad placement on the web, what threat does ad blocking software hold for ad placers? Myself being a Mozilla Firefox user, enjoys the web as an ad free environment, due to a combination of extensions. Does the ad still come up in your statistics? With Firefox quickly catching as one of the primary browsers, what does the future hold for ad placers?
Getting on to social networking, with the recent indexing of peoples profiles and accounts (e.g. Facebook account). Does this hold implications for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? When I go to Google and search my name, this first link that appears is my Facebook account! Which is a plus point for me, because I don’t have a website yet, but what will happen if I did?!?. I can imagine that Google’s database probably doubled overnight, doesn’t this cause other websites to move down in rankings?
entelligence said,
22 September 2008 @ 9:43 am
Hi Matan, thanks for the questions! Hopefully this answers you:
1. Ad Blocking
Typically banner ads will be blocked by any blocking software. Most advertisers opt to pay for banner ad delivery on a Pay Per Click basis – which seems to be the most cost effective form of advertising as advertisers only pay for a tangible action by potential customers. In other words, advertisers will still only be paying when the end user actually saw their ad & clicked on it. Over and above this, contextually relevant advertising has become the accepted way forward. As ads become progressively more relevant to the users context, users will cease to block ads as they actually offer some value.
2. Indexing of personal profiles on FaceBook vs. your own personal website
Google and other search engines will always give preference to content on the web that is spefically focussed on a topic. So a website that is dedicated to you will generally rank above your personal profile on FaceBook.
How will customers find you online? « Entelligence Blog said,
24 September 2008 @ 10:58 am
[...] Social networking applications – get a couple of people to install your application & it starts to spread. Read more about social network marketing here. [...]