Social Evolution
Look at how far we’ve come since the days of Myspace. In an attempt to generate new life, it has gone through many transformations and most recently, after Justin Timberlake’s contribution, plans to relaunch later this summer. While Myspace has steadily declined in popularity, it has paved the way for other social networking sites to change the way we interact with each other and brands. As each and every one of us have witnessed, social networking platforms are constantly evolving in an effort to become more engaging for consumers and more attractive to advertisers.
One of the newest social networking sites, Google+, has reached over 25 million users after only about a month of its launch. To put it in perspective, this milestone was not accomplished by Myspace, Facebook or Twitter until at least two years after their launch. Google+ hopes to continue their quick adoption by adding a gaming component to the platform, with many of the games being created by the same developers that have created “hit” games for Facebook. Google+ is clearly evolving and adapting to the social space, and as mentioned in a previous post, will inevitably have an advertising component at some point.
On the other hand, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are much more mature social networking sites that are getting to a point in their evolution where they are aggressively innovating to remain relevant and to drive advertising revenue. Both Facebook and Twitter are free for users, rich with data and have raised significant money from investors who expect them to return a profit (either by selling or going public like LinkedIn just did). Facebook is constantly introducing new updates to its site including more opportunities for marketers: sponsored stories, premium and marketplace ads, custom apps, and highly targeted advertising options. Aside from being able to target based on likes, interest, gender, etc., advertisers are now able to narrowly geo-target ads and sponsored stories by zip code, as we recently learned on our call with the Facebook sales team last week. Another specific ad unit discussed was the ‘Comment’ Sponsored Story, which according to Facebook, has been performing well since it launched in June.
Unlike its competitors, LinkedIn is the only one that offers a premium user account, which drives revenue directly from users. LinkedIn also recently went public, so now more than ever the company must show financial growth. This past June it attempted to do so by rolling out “social ads” (similar to Facebook’s Sponsored Stories) featuring actual faces of LinkedIn users and their public actions. While this move was shared with users in advance via the LinkedIn blog and banner ads throughout the site, many did not approve and considered it to be a violation of privacy. As a result, these ads still exist, but do not feature users’ photos and information.
We’ll be paying close attention as these sites work to attract more marketing dollars without turning off users. Tough balancing act!
As a marketer, have you had success leveraging any of these new social networking features or advertising units?
Jenaleigh Landers is an Account Coordinator at Griffin York & Krause.
