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Paid ads on social: Has the time come?
by Christopher Hosford, btobonline
Repost
According to a recent comScore overview of the U.S. online display advertising market for the first quarter of this year, nearly 1.11 trillion display ads were delivered to U.S. Internet users. Facebook accounted for 346 billion impressions, nearly double the number it delivered in the same period a year earlier.
facebook led all online publishers in the first quarter, with a 31.2% share of all display ad impressions. Yahoo sites, formerly the traditional leader, ranked second, followed by Microsoft sites and AOL.
The fact is, paid ads on social media sites are coming into their own. But can they stand the test of time?
“I think the jury is still out on whether advertising works on social sites,” said Gary Slack, chairman-chief experience officer at agency Slack & Co., Chicago. “There’s really no data as to what extent users actually notice or pay attention to display ads. There are just not enough referential case studies yet.”
Nevertheless, marketers are engaging with the channel regardless of the caveats.
“One thing that’s exciting about paid social ads is that you can target well, so that you can be discovered by someone not already following you,” said Noah Mallin, VP and group director-social marketing at global integrated brand agency Digitas, New York.
“If you’re trying to target women who are small-business owners, for example, you can use the “likes” and interest targeting in Facebook to narrow that down,” Mallin said. “That’s also true for LinkedIn. But, of course, your messaging must be relevant, which is the landing page where prospects can dig into your messages and offers.”
LinkedIn is emerging as a b2b advertising favorite, because of the undeniable benefit of business professionals who are members and actively seeking communications with other businesspeople.
“In the first place, LinkedIn’s user base is really appealing,” said Ben Grossman, communications strategist at agency Oxford Communications, Lambertville, N.J. “They have a demographic, income level and focus on their professions well above other social networks we could buy. And all LinkedIn profiles are associated with lots of business information, such as companies, contact roles and positions, and geography.”
Oxford recently completed a LinkedIn-intensive campaign for Brother International promoting a new large-scale printer-scanner. The campaign, “See the Bigger Picture,” featured LinkedIn display ads that drove viewers to a shareyourbiggerpicture landing page. There, small-business owners could post how a printer that produces 11-by-17-inch prints might help them in their businesses. Weekly prizes were awarded, as well as a grand prize of $10,000.
In addition to standard display ads and a do-it-yourself text ad option, LinkedIn offers its InMail service, available on a cost-per-message basis and doled out to any single targeted member a maximum of just four times a year.
“The lowest InMail campaign cost we’ve been able to achieve is $3 per message,” Slack said. “That may sound expensive-some 10 times what a typical email database list would cost to rent-but if you know exactly who you want to reach, and you believe there is no database better than LinkedIn, that could be a small price to pay for open rates of 20% to 40%.”
Twitter is featuring its Promoted Tweets, among other ad units.
“We were initially concerned that these wouldn’t perform, because we weren’t sure they’d feel authentic,” Mallin said. “But they’ve been working well for us; we’ve gotten a response that’s noticeable. We believe this can work if the message is right, it leads people to participate and is not just a one-way “community.’ ”
Social media advertising is a work in progress, with all its capabilities still to be explored. It even has potential in internal communications in reaching out to current employees.
“We asked one company to do an audit on how many employees have a profile on LinkedIn, and it was quite a lot,” Slack said. “In the last few months, we’ve added a feature that allows a company to run banner ads for that company on the profiles of their employees. We think that’s a nifty internal communications and branding tool.”
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