Types of Social Advertising

Direct Advertising That Is Based on Your Network of Friends

This can be the most effective format, but also causes the most controversy.

An example is the Facebook beacon project. Based on an action your friend has taken, you might see a message in your news feed saying 'Bob has just bought a 'RadioHead CD from MusicWorld'.

This can be an extremely effective mode as often people make decisions to purchase something or do something based on their close group of friends.

However, there is also a lot of controversy surrounding this, as it can be considered exploiting the personal relationships you have with your friends and also raises privacy concerns.

Direct Advertising Placed on Your Social Networking Site

This is a more traditional form of web advertising.

Just like you see banner ads on many other sites, this is a similar concept, except on a social networking site.

You can see these - for example - as a brick in the top right of your Facebook profile page.

There are two differences however - One is that these social networks can take advantage of demographic data on your profile and hence, target the ad directly to you.

Secondly, these types of ads can also be placed by individual developers on their application pages, through ad networks such as SponsorPay, AdParlor or Offerpal.

They have access to the same data and can generate income for application developers, giving them further motivation to create apps and giving advertisers a more engaging way to reach out to these social networking users.

Indirect Advertising by Creating 'Groups' or 'Pages'

This is an innovative marketing technique in which a company will create a 'page' or 'group' that users can choose to join.

They will use this to build up 'subscribers' or 'fans' and use this to market a contest, a new product, or simply just to increase brand awareness.

These groups can quickly grow in numbers of subscribers who see posts from the fan page fed down their news feed, in the case of Facbook fan pages.

These groups of users are, in effect, a soft list of consumers who have granted you permission to market to them.

Unlike an email subscriber list where consumers must submit an email address whilst granting such permission, a consumer who likes your fan page on Facebook is giving you permission to market to them without disclosing personal contact details.

This can become a very effective marketing tool.

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