Page 334 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

advertising — have come to the forefront. For the most part, the industry has
responded by making the display advertisements more immersive, with rollover
states (which means that something happens to the display when you mouse over
it), forms, pull-down menus, expandable units, and streaming audio and video
clips all built within them. The advertising industry has also developed technology
to make targeting consumers more precise using demographics, psychographics,
past purchasing behavior, website usage behavior, look-alike data (putting ads in
front of people who are similar to those who have already purchased a product)
and other programmatic means.

Those incremental innovations help grab users’ attention and provide a stronger
return on investment (ROI) for the advertisers. But social advertisements, which
infuse social content and a user’s social graph (mapping of the person’s friends)
directly into the ad unit or adjust who the advertising reaches based on a person’s
social graph, makes display advertisements far more interactive, engaging, and
better performing than other forms of display advertisements that have come
before.

DISPLAYING ADVERTISEMENTS

ON SOCIAL NETWORKS

Every year, Internet pundits predict the demise of online display advertising. They
prophesize that consumers will stop looking at display ads, and as a result, the
multibillion-dollar industry will die a sudden death. And each year, the statistics prove
them wrong. In fact, display advertising has largely remained flat, with minor declines.
Marketers continue to invest in display advertising and with good reason. Year after
year, display advertisements produce results, especially for direct-response campaigns,
where the dollar investments in display advertisements are traced directly to customer
acquisition. The amount they spend on display advertising may decrease as some
dollars shift to social media marketing, but it’s still a core component in their media
mix simply because those advertisements prove to be worth their investments.

But one type of online display advertising has never really worked well and continues
to provide dismal click-through rates: display advertising on social networks. The
reason is simple: People click display advertisements less when they’re in a social
environment engaging with their friends. You’ve probably seen display ads on social
platforms such as Facebook over the years. They do exist, but they don’t perform well.
As a result, Facebook has moved away from display advertising, and social networks
such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest now focus much more on native advertising
solutions that place the ads more directly in the user’s content stream.

318 PART 5 Old Marketing Is New Again with SMM