Liana Evans has a somewhat fresh approach to social networking, thinking of it not only as the core networking sites that Facebook and MySpace mainly are (especially Facebook is all about managing the network of your contacts). Evans places social web sites, which I would simply call communities, in the same category as the networking sites, and thus answers the question about how to take advantage of social networking with suggesting targeting communities.
I believe that the networking sites, primarily Facebook (at least at the moment), will be very effective in targeting certain demographics, such as specific regions, age groups etcetera. However, niche communities, such as the movie communities IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes mentioned by Evans in the interview, offer a different kind of information that may perhaps be even more valuable than the demographics of Facebook.
The reason for me believing this is that it is obviously often much easier to place a product within an interest range than within a demographic range. For example, if you are selling fishing equipment it makes sense to go to a fishing community, while targeting a certain demographic based on age, income, sex, location etcetera may be a pretty inaccurate targeting method.
Combined with the universality of the Internet that lessens the importance of location demographics, I believe this seriously undermines the value that Facebook can offer advertisers. Of course, Facebook may address this by simply encouraging people to list their interests in their system, but I believe such lists will never really be as accurate an information source as who actually visits the niche web sites.
In summary I believe the smaller communities that are focused on certain interests and hobbies will carry a relatively large portion of future advertising budgets.
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4 comments:
I think you make a good point. Facebook is probably not the best place to market interest specific items such as fishing equipment. However, there is some products that are targeted moe towards demographics, independent of special interests. An example of this might be video games, kitchen equipment, travel information, etc.
For these types of adds i beleive quantity is very important, so a big community like facebook will probably fit very well.
I agree that smaller, interest -specific communities are a more efficient place to run your ads than on a social network like Facebook, and also that this type of more targeted advertising will take up a great part of future advertising budgets.
And I definitely agree that Facebook isn't the best place to run advertising, and this simply because, as I've mentioned a couple of times earlier, I don't believe traditional advertising works on Facebook and the like. But I do believe that Facebook has great value out of a marketers point of view, what it needs is just a different approach. If you want to take advantage of social networking you have to let go of the traditional and start thinking outside the box.
I agree with what you said. But on marketer's view, they applies ads of diffierent item or product to different use. They admitted that small particular communities can be groups of consumer. In korea, there are a site call " Cyworld". It's like combination of face book and community site. They actually provide a online personal shopping market page. I know a person who run a store in there. Every picture or product can be link to the community page or product page. I think that people's demand creat various types of community and network.
Community becomes important as you mentioned, and I agree "who" matters more than "how many" in this new age of marketing with the impact of social networking.
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