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
