Internet advertising in social networks: overview, placement features, types and effectiveness. Advantages of Social Media Advertising

It's no secret that any social network today is a huge community of people who spend at least an hour a day in front of the monitor. Most often, each of the participants in any social network “sat out” for several hours in it, chatting with friends, watching entertaining content, reading some news, and so on. All this time he remains “within” this site, being a potential advertising contact. It would be foolish not to use different advertising tools to monetize and make money on such a large audience.

Therefore, today, advertising on social networks is both a powerful tool for earning money (for owners of groups and promoted pages), and a channel for selling their goods and services (for entrepreneurs, business owners). And not to use such an effective tool is tantamount to abandoning a powerful stream of customers.

In this article we will try to learn a little more about how advertising works on social networks. To do this, we will analyze the different formats for buying ads on the most popular Russian network “VKontakte”, and also collect the opinions of some advertisers working with different types of it (to compare effectiveness).

What is advertised?

So, for starters, we will decide on what for (most often) advertising on social networks is used. Who buys it and for what purpose? What money are advertisers willing to pay in order to get their share of traffic?

If you ever visited VK, you probably noticed an ad block on the left of the page. It is arranged quite simply: on top of it is a headline offering a certain product or service, below is a picture with the company logo or “person” - the person representing the product. Next may be the text (although this is optional). In fact, the formats in which advertising on social networks is offered are quite different, and you could meet them all.

To understand who and why is buying a place on the VK page, you should understand the audience of this resource. If we consider that there are millions of users on this social network, we can say that the audience here is quite diverse, and it can be targeted using different filters. Remember yourself: you indicate in the application form on the site your gender, age, and also the place of study and work. Advertisers who need to sell any product can customize their ad so that it displays to you.

Therefore, the answer to the question about the purpose of ordering VKontakte advertising can be completely different, because the audience of the site is different, which means there are all kinds of manufacturers of goods - companies that need the attention of all these people.

In other words, advertising on social networks is used by a variety of business representatives, from the owners of a local cinema to the largest online laundry store. Everyone can find their customer “VKontakte” (as in any other network) and “reach out” to him using their ads.

Where do they advertise?

Of course, despite the diversity of people spending time on their favorite sites, their age, gender, income and place of residence, there are also different ads on social networks. VKontakte, for example, has a more youthful landmark. And if we talk about Odnoklassniki, then this site is more likely to be an older audience. The Mamba dating site is unlikely to be visited by children and older people, as well as those who already have a soul mate. Here you can find lonely, adventurous people. That is, each social network has its own “core” - a group of users united by some common features. You should be guided by it in the event that you are promoting advertising on social networks of one nature or another.

Types of Advertising

Each social network uses its own advertising format. Often sites work with different types to provide the advertiser with more tools with which you can “reach out” to your client. It is quite difficult to cover all types of advertising materials that operate on the Russian Internet, so we will talk about the most popular network - VKontakte. Here is the largest audience, and therefore the most active market for advertising services. Therefore, on her example, we will see what is online advertising in social networks.

Ad unit

The classic and most popular, apparently, format for promoting their services is placement in the side advertisement block of ads. The latter is located on all pages of the VKontakte site, and you can see it every time you visit this resource, on the left side. We talked about him a little higher.

This block is configured from an advertising account available to all users. In it, you can change settings such as the payment format (per click or per 1000 impressions), audience (gender, age, groups, preferences and a host of other settings), cost, appearance of the ad (picture and title, picture + title and text- description) and more. In fact, advertising on social networks in a dedicated block (and there is probably one on all platforms, since this is a fairly common format) is presented by a special configurator. It gives a wide selection of options for what your advertisement will be. Your task is to configure it so as to interest your client, replenish the balance of your account and start showing ads.

Promotion Records

Another interesting option for providing information about their products is advertising records. You can see them if you open the “News” section. Advertising services on social networks using such entries is a common way to promote yourself as “organically" as possible without causing annoyance to users.

focus on the target audience. Most of the most popular social networks allow advertisers to show their own ads to a strictly targeted audience. This method is called targeted. That is, any advertiser can set the parameters of people who, in his opinion, may be interested in specific products. This can be any data accepted for filling in the questionnaires - gender, profession, hobbies, place of residence, age, profession and others. And if the advertiser offers, for example, diesel generators, he can be sure that only potential buyers will see the advertisement, and, for example, children, philologists, women, city dwellers, people interested exclusively in the humanities, this opportunity will be deprived. Naturally, if the customer does not want them to be able to see the ad;
detailed analysis of the progress of advertising. Also, most "advanced" social networks provide the ability to view a detailed analysis of visitor activity by a variety of parameters and make current adjustments;
large audience. Every day, the most famous social networks are visited by several million users. This gives tremendous potential for the customer and makes the advertising company the most effective tool today to maximize the number of visitors to your resource. With the proper organization of the advertising process, thousands of daily visits and hundreds of sales of goods and services offered by the customer are possible. Because of the several thousand visitors, "sorted" according to the target parameters, there will probably be those interested in the customer’s offer and willing to purchase the same diesel, gasoline generators or other products;
cheapness. Although the cost of advertising services in social networks is constantly and steadily increasing, today they remain the most affordable.

the difficulty of filtering quality traffic;
the inability to predict the results of an advertising company before its launch;
the need for special knowledge, experience.

As you can see, the shortcomings boil down mainly to the lack of experience in this type of activity, since this is a relatively fresh way of promoting goods and services. Therefore, we can conclude: to learn, try, dare and not give up, while in any business, in advertising through social networks, you can achieve great success.

Everyone knows how quickly the popularity of social networks among Internet users is growing, this is mainly due to the fact that these sites provide unlimited opportunities for users to communicate, as well as to find a new circle of friends. For a long time, leaders in this area have been such social networks as Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki.

Such a concentration of consumers should not go unnoticed by advertisers; in addition, this is an excellent opportunity for direct contact with consumers. The growth in the volume of the advertising market in social networks is logical: in addition to increasing the presence of existing companies on the media resources, more and more new brands are joining in there. This, in turn, leads to a complete redistribution of resources between previously popular sites for commercial advertising. Many sites are now optimized for the functionality of social networks.

Social networks are a unique platform for promoting your website, the so-called QS. There are several options for attracting a new audience, for example, simply creating a group and inviting third-party participants into it, or, as an option, display advertising. It is important to understand that advertising on social networks is different from the usual display advertising on other sites. This is due, first of all, to the specifics of the audience and the possibility of addressing offers to that particular audience that satisfies a particular advertiser in the given parameters, in other words, targeting is applicable. This is the main advantage of advertising on social networks - the ability to accurately identify the target audience. This is due to the fact that all users, passing registration, provide almost complete information about themselves: from gender, age and to the address of residence and contact phone number. Naturally, it is assumed that not all indicate reliable information. Nevertheless, the probability of getting into the target group is an order of magnitude higher than when using other types of advertising. All the benefits do not end there. Most importantly, the cost of contextual and display advertising on social networks is much less than on third-party sites.

Despite the attractiveness of these sites for placing their advertising on them, there are certain disadvantages.
For example, the inability to attract a mass audience in highly specialized areas. Social networks are best used to advertise consumer goods and services. Also, the “minuses" include the lack of tools for monitoring advertising and a preliminary analysis of its effectiveness.

Every day, millions of users conduct dialogues about companies, as well as their products and services, sharing their subjective opinions and impressions. As a result, an individual participant in a network resource can ruin the reputation of a company with a huge turnover, but it can be the other way around. The disadvantage of advertising on social networks is the lack of potential user predisposition. Social networks are so popular because there is no special control over the content created in them, only this environment is by no means unsafe for brands. Users do not have an interest in advertising, they allow themselves both positive and negative reviews about products whose advertising is placed. This, in turn, leads to the accumulation of negative reviews, which can spoil the reputation of the advertisement and the product itself. Also, an advertisement may be published where there is offensive or pirated content, in which case it will be in the vicinity of the prohibited content.
The advantages and disadvantages of advertising on social networks will not change the overall development trend of this industry, but the introduction of social network analysis technologies to identify professional communities can correct the situation with insufficient returns from social network services.

Welcome to you time of day, dear friends! Today we continue with you the topic of attracting from various channels of Internet advertising.

As you remember, in the last article we talked about some of the secrets and subtleties of this effective advertising tool. I am sure that you have learned a lot of interesting and useful information that you can successfully put into practice.

The theme of our inclusion today is “ Quality advertising on social networks».

I decided to divide this topic into 2 parts. It is too large. Therefore, today we will talk more about what is generally covered by the concept of “High-quality advertising in social networks” and about the main advantages and disadvantages of promoting affiliate programs on social networks. Why income on affiliate programs? I think you have not forgotten what our mailing list is dedicated to.

I will not say trivial things like:

“Social networks today have gained immense popularity and can be an excellent tool for affiliate marketing, and every self-respecting moneymaker should know how to attract social traffic to your or someone else’s site as a partner.”

Etc. This is a no brainer. I am sure you have heard these phrases more than once. Just watch the short video below and you will be amazed at what social networks have become today:

Since we decided to touch upon such a hot topic as high-quality advertising in social networks, I think you should know ...

What is social media advertising?

In fact, there are 2 abbreviations that help to understand what lies behind the concept of advertising on social networks. Let's look at them.

SMM (Social Media Marketing) - This is the process of attracting visitors and attention to a brand or product through social networks.

That is, to put it another way, this is a set of measures for using social networks as channels for promoting various companies and solving other business problems.

I’m sure you met official tapes and groups of well-known Russian and world brands on the expanses of various social networks. This is just an example of SMM promotion.

SMO (Social Media Optimization, SMO) - site optimization for social networks, or in other words, a set of measures that are aimed at attracting visitors to the site from social media sources: social networks, blogs, etc.

Here, the situation is slightly different. The main task of SMO promotion - This is to form a community of interests within the site itself, to which visitors come from social networks. Here the big role is played not by the brand, not by the name of the company or product. Here, the basis of everything is quality content that attracts visitors to the site and turns them into regular visitors.

But what does this have to do with affiliate programs and earning money on them? - you ask. The most direct and we, if desired and able, as partners of any product or service, can use both SMO and SMM promotion for this.

And if we create high-quality content (video, audio, article), post it on social networks and people go from the content to the page of our site where our affiliate link is located or directly to the official site of our affiliate product or service, then this is already an example SMO marketing.

Most popular social networks

In fact, there are many social networks. Hundreds Maybe thousands. But not all of us know. And we know, as a rule, only about those that are at the hearing and those that we ourselves use. To promote affiliate programs, 3 social networks are most suitable. I am sure you are familiar with all three:

1) Pretty simple for user

2) Includes moneymaker tools

3) Well attended (to say the least)

4) Traffic of various social levels (the ability to find targeted traffic)

The biggest mistake newcomers

Many times I heard:

“I registered in one affiliate program. Threw links to the social network. Already 30 transitions and NOT ONE ORDER. ”

This is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous to think that 30 clicks from social networks will bring you a sale. Especially if you recommend it to your friends who have no idea what you are advertising and how this product or service can help them. For advertising on social networks TARGET AUDIENCE NEEDED. Even if 2000 people who are not interested in your affiliate product or service move over, the result will most likely be zero.

My tricky way to advertise on Twitter

But ... it was a very tricky scheme. I’ll talk a little about how I did it ...

I created a twitter account. I found accounts of well-known information businessmen and added to followers to people who read this informational businessman. That is, they were people who were really interested in the topic of information business.

In a couple of days I could add a couple of hundred such people. A certain percentage was added to me as readers. This is called mutual following.

Thus, I could add several thousand people, several hundred of whom read me. Well, if they didn’t read it, then at least they saw some of my posts in a common stream.

Next, I wrote various posts. They could lead to free courses, trainings, and to sales pages. But the goods were inexpensive - 300-900 rubles. And be sure - my messages were less enticing. That is, a very large part of the readers clicked on my links. And there were sales. There were few of them - 5-7 a month, but they were.

I don’t know how this method works today. But I’m sure you can apply it. Therefore, shake on the mustache.

Social Media Ads: Key Benefits

First of all, of course, I would like to touch upon the advantages of this type of advertising:

On many social networks, advertisers can display their ads strictly targeted to the target audience. Such advertising is also called targeted, when you can designate gender, age, profession, place of residence, marital status, hobbies of the visitor. This makes it possible to show your ads only to those who will be interested in the goods and services that you advertise.

In many social networks, you have the opportunity to fairly deeply analyze the process of conducting an advertising campaign, evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign in many ways and, based on this analysis, adjust the course of your advertising campaign to achieve the best result.

3) Large audience

As you know, millions of users visit social networks every day, which gives great potential for the advertiser. No tool can give as many visitors to your site, affiliate product or service as effective quality advertising on social networks. If you correctly use social networks and tools for advertising, then you can get tens of thousands of visits per day and hundreds of affiliate sales. Here, it’s clear that the business will not do without special knowledge and a healthy advertising budget.

Cons of advertising on social networks

In fact, there are a lot of minuses, as well as pluses:

- It’s very difficult to filter quality traffic

- There is no clear forecast of the result from the launched advertising campaign

- No knowledge of tools for effective advertising

But many shortcomings can be minimized if you know how to effectively use advertising tools and learn how to do it. It really is. Many failures when launching advertising campaigns occur precisely because a person does not know how to use the tools for advertising correctly, test advertisements and adjust them in the future.

What is the best way to advertise on social networks?

The eternal question. And in many ways it is determined by what social networks are generally created for - for communication and entertainment. Therefore, entertainment goods or general consumer goods are more often sold. That is, what is interesting to most. Generally. For example, now, in summer, advertising for T-shirts will go well 🙂

Again, a product or service for advertising on social networks you need to choose based on how you will advertise and what you will advertise. For example, VKontakte can advertise goods and services with the help of its own groups and publics, other people's publics and groups, as well as through the advertising network of the social itself. Depending on the choice of the advertising channel within the social network itself, the advertised goods and services will vary. We will talk more about this in our next inclusion.

Footwear
Loans
Online Games
Dating services
Cell Phones
Tourist services
Etc.

In the next issue ...

And in the end, I just want to cheer you up and show this funny video. Check out how the Secretary General ignites 🙂

Friends! Waiting for your comments and additions! And, of course, I will be glad to your "likes".

I wish you a summer mood and a holiday - Independence Day!

Sincerely, your friend and assistant Bulat Makseev

Agree, for any business it is important to find the fastest, shortest path to the target audience. He copes with this task perfectly. contextual advertising. It is she who for many years holds the lead among the tools of Internet promotion.

I think these services do not need a special introduction: Yandex.Direct, Google Adwords and Runner. We have talked a lot about them and will talk more.

With the development and growth of the popularity of social media, it has appeared and is gaining strength. targeted advertising.

Term itself "Targeted advertising" refers to the display of advertisements that are not tied to the content of a web page, but to a specific group of users highlighted on the basis of their previous behavior or personal data.

The ability to advertise a product without a website is convenient for small businesses. You can create a page of your company in social networks, with a description of goods or services, and bring customers to it.
Flexible settings: you can select different target groups for a wide range of parameters (geography, age, gender, education, interests).
The ability to work with each user group separately, to create different ads for different audiences.

Targeted advertising on social networks and beyond is an effective channel of communication with the audience. In their own profiles, users indicate a lot of information that advertisers need so much - this is not only gender, age and marital status, but the interests and hobbies of the user.

The development of this advertising channel is only entering the active phase! I’m sure that in the near future the quantity and quality of user data will only grow and advertisers will receive more advanced targeting tools.

Of course, first of all, large companies came to social networks, whose rates in the same context have already exceeded all reasonable limits - they actively use targeted advertising to attract customers. This is especially noticeable in the banking segment.

I am sure that none of the businesses should bypass advertising on social networks. Social networks - this is one of the main entry points of the audience on the Internet and to have no representation in them is no longer profitable for almost any business.

There is no minimum effective budget for targeted advertising. You can spend millions to attract an audience, or you can come up with a beautiful story and, due to its viral distribution among users, get a huge audience reach and many free targeted clicks to the site.

From experience I can say that you can notice the results of an advertising campaign on social networks with a budget of 10 thousand rubles.

Be sure to create company pages and gather your audience on social networks. Even if it’s now minimum, tomorrow the situation may change.
Do not be afraid of experiments! When it seems that you are using 100% of all advertising channels, you need to look back and conduct a series of experiments - maybe changing a button on a purchase page, replacing an advertisement in context, or creating a competition for your audience on social networks will bring huge results and make your Internet advertising is even more effective.

Below is a video fragment where Semyon Poletsky (Project Manager at SocialTank, a teacher at the online courses “SMM Manager” and “Manager for Contextual Advertising”) talks about the main differences between targeted advertising and contextual and media.

As a result of a joint study conducted by comScore and the social network Facebook, it turned out that most European Internet users are quite satisfied with the range of opportunities for communication and information provided by social networks, and they are not at all torn into the wild open spaces that lie outside the “cozy zhezheshekha”. Moreover - the share of time that the average European spends on social networks increases by an average of 17% per year! At the same time, the myth was debunked that the main audience of social networks is young people - in fact, the differences between age groups were not too significant.

One of the main reasons for the growing popularity of Facebook as an advertising platform is a significant expansion of the advertising opportunities of the social network, including the emergence of new advertising formats designed for mobile users - this was the conclusion of marketers from the Kenshoo Inc. campaign According to the study, in the first half of 2012, advertising budgets for Facebook increased by 32%, compared with the same period in 2011. Kenshoo Marketing Director Aaron Goldman: "Sellers are revealing their wallets as Facebook continues to innovate using new ad formats and targeting features."

"Seven times measure cut once". Does Facebook need to promote your company?

The issue of promoting goods through social networks and increasing sales is the most controversial issue in the IT industry today. We will not go into the depths of the debate; we will dwell only on undeniable facts.

To get started, let's look at the numbers:

15 million - this is 18% of the total working population of Russia (according to the study) and to a greater extent - these are residents of the central region of Russia. Therefore, before deciding to promote through Facebook, be sure to evaluate if your target audience is on this network.

There is? Does quantification meet expectations? Then feel free to get acquainted with the tools of FB.

One of the most popular (due to its simplicity) types facebook promotions is an targeted advertising or TGB (text-graphic blocks).

Here they are:

TGB is the fastest and easiest way to draw the attention of an audience to your brand or your products.

Types of ads in the TGB

Which type of ad is right for you depends on the goals of your advertising campaign.

Your goal is to reach a new audience, attract “likes” to your public page and talk about your company or its products to those who are not yet familiar with you.

2. Attracting traffic to third-party resources

In this case, the type of announcement is similar to Yandex.Direct ads: selling ad + going to the landing page.

3. Promotion of posts

The goal is to attract the attention of the audience to interesting and useful materials that you post on the pages of your account.

Suitable in two cases:

As a useful video, I suggest watching a fragment of a lesson with Andrey Yablonsky, “Promotion through social networks.” You will see a wonderful pyramid of KPI on social networks and hear a couple of interesting cases.

At the end of the article, we emphasize once more, before advertising through Facebook, analyze the presence and activity of your audience in this network, pay attention to the features of the FB services.

And remember that sales through social networks is the most relevant topic for today and everything connected with this will develop. Therefore, it makes sense to periodically return to the topic if during this period you decide not to use promotion through social networks.