Advertising in Social Media
By Xuanling Li (Candy)
There is no doubt that social media has had influences of changing the way people produce and consume information. Social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are increasingly becoming more and more popular. According to Taylor & Lewin & Strutton (2011), people tend to be spending more time and more active on involving in the social networking sites, which is “growing from an average of 3 hours per week in December 2008 to more than 5.5 hours in December 2010”. As a result, social media platforms offer great opportunities for companies to promote their products, service, and business in an innovative and creative way. There are many benefits of social media in the field of advertisement. This article will discuss the ways advertisers use to create an online advertising campaign by examining the content diversity in social media advertising; the sharable and interactive features of social media platforms that creatively help advertisers to meet their marketing goal; the connection and interaction between the online world and the physical world (advertisers, advertising campaigns, and audiences); the cost of using social media to create an ad.
Firstly, advertising associate with the features of social media that the content presentations of advertising are multiple in the use of media form, such as text, hyperlinks, images, videos, audios and online flash games. Generally, these different media forms will be used and applied together to an online campaign. For example, ‘UniqloMatch’ is an online flash game that used to promote the new and the first Uniqlo retail store opening in Melbourne CBD. As their official website described, “To get started, simply connect with Facebook and Like UNIQLO Australia and you’ll be on your way to winning.” Every participant could win, especially the first winner will win a free trip to Japan accompanied with two friends. This campaign is successful to spread the word about the new store and branding, meanwhile, the use of Facebook connection contributed to make the campaign go viral online. On Facebook, users are encouraged to invite friends to the competition, meanwhile, their participations will be shown in their timeline and it naturally increases the exposure of the campaign and create buzz in the online community. In this case, social media did a great job in terms of increasing interaction between audiences and the campaign; spreading promotional information to make the campaign successfully became viral. Therefore, social media is a great promotion tool to produce a campaign regarding with social media compatibility of using multi-media elements.
Secondly, successful online advertising campaigns benefit from the active and high interaction between advertising and audiences of social media advertisement. Users interaction in social media can be divided into two aspects: communication and engagement. Social media is a great tool for advertisers to connect with their audiences easily and effectively. As Subrata (2014) in the interview described that ‘Communication is no longer a one-way zone. Marketers are now listening to consumers’ input and suggestions, and then acting on them.’ It is true that consumers are now turning to social media for open and honest experiences with businesses. Taking electronic word of mouth (E-WOM) as an example, it allows consumers to give valuable feedbacks (good/bad) to advertisers in real time as it is happening.
Moreover, with the consideration of audiences’ engagement of an ad, social media contributes to increase the shareability of an online campaign. To become friends, followers and fans with others are common phenomenon on social networking sites, which results in the growth of sharing advertising. A company, for instance, may create a fan page on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in order to attract as many users as they can. According to Chu (2013, pp. 2), advertisers benefit from the relationships with their consumers on social media because “the number of fans essentially is unlimited, allowing companies or brands to enlist thousands of fans; and users who “fan” a company or brand may want to follow it without granting the firm access to their profile.” On one hand, the content-sharing activities of “fans” within a fan page, and content-sharing activities from “fans” to friends in their own networking would together increase awareness of a brand or company. On the other hand, the connection between different social networking sites play an essential role in creating buzz for a campaign and make it viral online. For instance, YouTube videos could be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, blog and etc. More importantly, YouTube is a video-sharing site allows users to post, watch, and forward videos without registration or subscription. Thus, as the result of the combination of different social media platforms, it is in favor of achieving high sharability of online campaigns.
Thirdly, people tend to be more willingly to involve with the campaign through an easy, user-friendly and a way they already confident with. The use of social media in advertising contributes to the success of an online campaign considering user-friendly features of social media platforms. For example, ‘IKEA Facebook Showroom’ successfully used existing tagging function on Facebook, which allowed participants to get involved into the competition effectively. Meanwhile, tagging is a common behavior of Facebook users that made audiences felt more confident by using tagging in the competition. Thus, the campaign design needs to be as simple as possible so that customers can easy to use and involve in it, in order to increase the interaction between customers and campaign/advertisers.
Besides, understanding customers’ behavior/participation in social media is crucial to advertisers because it enables advertiser to attract their target audiences’ to engage into the campaign. Being social is a primary goal for individuals to get connections on social networking sites. The way that people become social on social networking platforms could be concluded as follow: posting pictures and statements, connecting with friends to extend social cycle online; sharing valuable or entertaining content with friends in their network on social networking sites; meeting people who have same interests; and etc. “Sharing pictures and updates on Facebook makes you look fun, sociable, well-traveled, cool etc. This goes the same with the links people share,” explained Subrata (2014) in the interview. There is no doubt that people tend to be willingly making a statement with the links they would like to share. As Kimberley (2010) described, relevancy to what the consumer is looking for is the key and accuracy of position of paid-for content is necessary regarding with what users expect from social networking sites like Twitter. So advertisers could receive satisfying results by posting content appealing to their target audiences considering audiences’ participation in social networking sites.
Furthermore, it is valuable to understand the differences between social media platforms and keep object of advertising in mind. This is because the distinguishable differences of social networking sites and the purposes of using them require advertisers to have a clear objective for a campaign by choosing social media platforms. “There will be a group of people, however large or small, on these channels just waiting for you to put yourself or your brand on their radar (Linda 2011).” According to Subrata (2014), people divulge much information on their personal Facebook pages from age, to interest, to relationship status, and even locations are what “make Facebook an advertisers paradise”. As a result, Facebook, for instance, would be useful to increase the exposure of brand, business, services, to engage with your customers, as well as to build new relationships. Facebook does the best about making a campaign become viral, people share interesting campaigns mostly through Facebook (Subrata, 2014). Therefore, the effectiveness and success of advertising by using social media depends on better understanding of the different use for different purposes of a social media platform and a clear objective/end goal of the ad.
Finally, the cost of using social media for advertising is low. Social media platforms are free for everyone offering great opportunities to companies when they are limited in budget for an ad. “The beauty of social media from a cost point of view is that there really don’t need to be any costs involved, apart from your time” (Linda 2010). Moreover, a large quantity of audiences on social media is useful for advertising spread widely and enable companies receive customers’ feedback timely instead of spending too much time on marketing management and customer services outside the online world. Besides, techniques used for advertising in social media platforms are user-friendly and easy to control, which is allowing advertisers to save more money and time on producing an ad. Thus, by using existing free function of social networking sites help to decrease the budget of an ad and save time on getting customers’ valuable feedback, which are important factors influencing a campaign development and its success.
In conclusion, the content presentations of advertising in social media are diversified, interactive, and creative by combining different media elements together. The existing features of social media platforms such as friends, fans, followers are what makes advertising online shareable and become viral. Besides, the existing features of social media platforms are mostly free that enables advertisers to create a low-budget online campaign effectively. Meanwhile, social media understand best of audiences’ information receiving and consuming because, especially the increase of interaction between advertisers and audiences; and the growth of engagements of individuals in an ad. To have a clear objective and purpose by using social media of advertising would be helpful to meet promotional intent and it is valuable to make advertising online successfully. Thus, social media platforms offer great opportunities for advertisers or companies to use them for marketing and promoting purposes. Also, practices of social media advertising would improve a company’s techniques of up-to-date creative advertising production.