Social Media Advertising - Future Trends
The rapid evolution of social media has led to consumers controlling brands rather than marketers. Influencing news coverage through press releases and media relations is far more difficult now with news channels creating and shaping stories hand-in-hand with the general public. 30 percent of frequent social networkers trust their peers’ opinions when making a major purchase decision, but only 10 percent trust an advertisement (1). 77 percent of online shopper’s read consumer reviews before making a purchase (2).
“Social sites are also realizing the need for better advertising and tracking platforms. Google’s OpenSocial platform and Facebook’s SocialAds are steps in this direction.”
Participatory websites like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr now account for 12 percent of all web traffic (3). Content generation on social media sites is still low, with Hitwise report findings suggesting that less than 1 percent of internet users are generating content, with the rest only viewing the generated content(3). Sites that are simpler to edit like Wikipedia see user participation (editing/uploading) to the tune of 4.38 percent. However, content generation on video and photo sites is low (less than 1 percent).
Social Media spending was 7.8 percent of the total Online Marketing Budget allocated by US Marketing Professionals in Q3 2007(4). Brand marketers are realizing the importance of social media. Monitoring social media sites like news and blogs to check any negative publicity and support positive publicity is crucial. Further, companies should keep track of emerging trends on social media sites and modify business strategy accordingly.
Social sites are also realizing the need for better advertising and tracking platforms. Google’s OpenSocial platform and Facebook’s SocialAds are steps in this direction. Google’s recently launched OpenSocial platform has been grabbing a lot of attention. Social gadgets built using the OpenSocial platform will work across many popular social networking sites including Orkut, MySpace, hi5, LinkedIn, Ning and SalesForce. Google’s portable social gadgets are poised to give tough competition to the widely popular Facebook platform.
- JupiterResearch Press Release
- Jupiter Research - “Retail Marketing: Driving Sales Through Consumer-Created Content”
- Hitwise US 2.0 Research Note: Measuring Web 2.0 Consumer Participation, June 2007
- Coremetrics , “2nd Annual Face of the New Marketer”, provided to eMarketer, October 30, 2007
Author Information: We offer Internet Marketing Services - Infovedics including Display advertising, Search Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Website Development. Creative, simple and effective internet marketing strategies for your business.
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Written by: Scott Frangos
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 9:25 am and is filed under Blogging Help, Social Media-Marketing, Web Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
