Thursday, November 12, 2009

Social Networks are a big target for advertising and marketing products.


Since I had recently heard an interesting presentation for on line advertising and marketing strategies, I wanted to share some of my findings according to a survey from IDC.

While social networking continues to remain popular and grow, advertisers looking to grab users attention are seeing low click-through rates.

There are four major reasons why people use social networks: to connect and communicate; in response to peer-pressure; for entertainment; and for work-related purposes.

More than 61 per cent of survey respondents spend more than 30 minutes per session on social network sites, and 38 per cent remained parked for one hour or more.

However, only 57 per cent of social network site users said they clicked on an ad in the past year, compared with 79 per cent of all internet consumers.

Despite its phenomenal growth, social networks have yet to reach online advertising nirvana. It’s a place where marketers are able to serve ads, promotions and offers to friends of friends based on other peoples recommendation, and where word-of-mouth marketing spreads to create waves of self-selecting consumers eager to interact with marketers, according to eMarketer.

It was projected in 2008 that advertisers would spend $1.4 billion to place ads on online social networks this year. eMarketer also forecast ad spending on social networks would reach $2.4 billion in 2011. This is a lot of money being spent on advertising. Will consumers that normally get attracted through ads by the normal or traditional advertising, such as paper or magazine ads get run down by the on-line marketing strategies? This will only take time to see if people using their mobile phones or the internet to look for products they are interested in purchasing will stop looking at traditonal print ads and put a real dent in the old way of advertising.

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