Social Media Advertising ¦ Website Development ¦ XTmotion Londonarticle

Most of us who are trying to sell something online are now familiar with the general advertising jargon associated with the web: pay-per-click advertising campaigns, banner ads, click-through rates, and Google Adwords amongst them. And even more than traditional advertising, these offer clear-cut measures for the success or failure of an ad campaign: we can count click-throughs, and how many of those ended up buying something from our website. Or even easier, they are counted for us automatically.

But with the flourishing of social networking and other social media online, advertisers are presented with new challenges and immense opportunities.

While placing an advert on Facebook or YouTube fits more with the ‘old school’ of online advertising, associating your brand with exciting online ventures – videos, celebrity MySpace pages, or popular blog sites can get your brand noticed by far more people – and talked about. A YouTube channel or video can garner popularity votes and shoot you to the top of the YouTube Charts; an interactive game or quiz on Facebook could get thousands associating their enjoyment with your product.

But before your embark on any such campaigns, it would be good to take some advice from the gurus. In her new book, Advertising 2.0: Social Media Marketing in a Web 2.0 World, Tracey Luten makes the point that to measure outcomes of social advertising you must balance your usual quantitative metrics (how many click-throughs, how many conversions) with qualitative insights (how many times was my brand/product spoken about positively in blogs, as opposed to mentioned negatively?)

She also highlights the need to have a clear planning and measurement process in which you:

• Review your usual advertising campaign objectives to align them with what is achievable though social advertising channels.
• Map all the components of the strategy – where do you plan on placing yourself, getting yourself talked about, etc
• Determine what criteria you will use to assess how successful you are in meeting your objectives, and importantly, how you will measure these criteria. (Will you use the online equivalents of the traditional ‘media clipping service’, or will you use Google tools that are managed by your team in house, like Google Alert for example?)
• Establish the benchmarks against which you will measure your success.
• Keep analysing your effectiveness and adjust your strategy as you move forward.
• Keep measuring.

Also consider in your planning and your objectives the type of contact with individuals that social advertising can achieve. There is contact with:

• ‘Brand-generated content’ – that you’ve put out there yourself: your banner ads, sponsored YouTube Channel, etc;
• ‘Consumer-generated content’ – from bloggers or online product reviewers for example;
• ‘Consumer-fortified content’ – comments from users on your own content or on content from other users, or votes for your online video for example; and finally
• ‘Exposures to content consumers’ – how many people are reading the blogs, watching the videos, even though they’re not necessarily voting for them or commenting on them.

If you get your content just right, the viral nature of the web 2.0 can present great opportunities for getting your product noticed, watched and talked about.