Advertising Edge with Social Medium

As social medium like Facebook and Google+ start to take a growing cut of digital advertising dollars, a increasingly convincing draw for advertisers to choose Facebook and Google+ over conventional internet advertising venues is the power of social connections. Both Facebook and Google+ have seen significant increases in clicks when advertisements had social annotations connected to them like liking and +1’ing an advertisement.  Clicking these annotations says that specific uses approve of these advertisements and allows connections to see this approval as well. To look at some of these statistical differences, Nielsen analyzed results from 79 Facebook/Google+ campaigns through the span of half a year to determine how well social messages succeeded in getting through to the audience.

The obvious advantage to advertising on Facebook/Google+ rather than a website in line with a specific audience’s interests is the ability for people to recommend an advertisement by liking or +1’ing which allows someone’s social connections on these sites to see them as well. On average, social advertisements generate a 55% increase in recall and social advertisements saw a 5% -10% increase in clicks.  Nielsen says this decided increase can be explained by consumers’ attitudes. In surveys carried out in 2011, Nielsen saw 76 percent of U.S. Internet consumers said they most trusted recommendations from personal acquaintances whereas 49 percent of U.S. Internet consumers trusted consumer opinions online. Therefore, this not so small increase of 27 percent should serve as justification for the increase in advertisement performance. It makes sense for consumers to trust recommendations from connections than recommendation from random strangers. Now what is interesting is the ability of Facebook and Google+ to continue finding clever ways to push these numbers even higher. Google+ has allowed advertisements to be delivered to end users when something in searched in Google and Facebook saw a 46% increase in clicks when they provided end users with the “sponsored stories” feature. Through both of these steps, we can see how social medium is really taking a step forward in the advertising game. Through the mass data of social networking and social connections, advertising has found a new venue in Facebook and Google+ that show higher returns than any other online sites.

http://mashable.com/2012/03/06/google-plus-ads/

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=31136