The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

This article is part three of a four-part series on social network advertising. Get caught up on my previous two articles below.

Hyper-Targeted Ads on Social Networks

Should You Advertise Directly on a Social Network?

Social networks like MySpace and Facebook offer advertisers a huge audience and unparalleled hyper-targeting capabilities. For many advertisers, appearing directly on social networks is an ideal complement to their existing search campaigns. However, not everyone who advertises on search engines should be taking the plunge. 

Do advertise on social networks if you can narrowly define your potential customers in demographic and psychographic terms. What makes social network advertising unique is the very granular set of targeting options available. If you can describe your potential customers in terms of gender, age, geographic location, education level, relationship status, or cultural interest group, only social networks offer you the tools to target ads based on this information.

For example, an ideal social network advertiser would be a community college advertising associate degree programs. The college could target ads to local people ages 17-35 with only a high school education. A company selling golf vacation packages might target college-educated males, ages 30+ nationwide, listing "golf" among their interests.

Don't advertise on social networks just because they exist. Social networks are very trendy, and many marketers feel the urge to get involved. But don't get caught up in the excitement unless you have a plan. Figure out if social networks meet your advertising needs. If your boss wants your brand to "be on Facebook," STOP! Don't forge ahead with a Facebook advertising account. Instead, figure out what you want to use Facebook for, then decide which Facebook option is right for you. For example, Facebook and MySpace both allow you to create a free profile page for your brand that you can direct potential customers to.

Do advertise on social networks if no one knows your offer exists. One of the shortcomings of search engine ads is that available inventory is limited to offers people already know about. To see your ad, someone must search for a related keyword, or visit a relevant site on the content network. If you have a brand new offer no one knows about, Google will not have contextual ad inventory for you. So if you can profile your potential customer (by age, gender, interest group, etc.), but they don't know you exist, social network ads will be the perfect advertising medium to create awareness.

Don't advertise on social networks if you want to target ads based on keywords.  Conversely, if you want to reach people who are already aware of your service, use search rather than social networks. While social networks do offer keyword- targeting options, these are not the same as search engine keywords. Instead, these parameters are for targeting based on a fixed set of cultural interest groups only, like sports teams, book titles, movie titles etc.

Do advertise on social networks if you have a compelling photo or illustration to go with your text ad. An important and often-overlooked difference between social network ads and search engine ads is the format of the ad itself. Ads on social networks may optionally include a small graphic. Have you been wishing Google would allow your ad to include a photo of your product, your snazzy logo, or a mug shot of your senior partner? You can't do it on Google (unless you hire a designer to make banner ads), but you can easily do it on Facebook and MySpace. Graphics are a beneficial addition to many ads, and you can, and should, use them in your social network ads.

Don't advertise on social networks just because there is so much available inventory.  MySpace and Facebook get lots of page views, so there's a lot of ad inventory there, but that does not mean that their inventory is cheaper or more cost-effective than ads you'd buy elsewhere. Furthermore, the Google content network is many times bigger than Facebook or MySpace, because Google does such a great job of aggregating thousands of small, medium, and large publishers into a single advertising network. Your Google content network ads reach a much larger audience than you could reach on Facebook or MySpace.

In fact, the Google content network includes a ton of ad inventory on MySpace. Google has an advertising deal with MySpace, and Microsoft has an advertising deal with Facebook, which means your existing AdWords and adCenter ads already appear on MySpace and Facebook, respectively. Whether you reach out to this audience directly or through a search network is a decision you should make based on which targeting options are best suited to what you're advertising. If you want demographic and psychographic targeting, use the social networks' own ad systems. But if what you really want is keyword-based inventory (e.g., pages that mention "bed and breakfast in Vermont" or "snickerdoodle recipe"), you can access this inventory more effectively through the search engines. 

Don't advertise on social networks unless you're prepared to invest the time to do it right. The barrier to entry in social network advertising is very low, and it's easy to create a campaign and get started. The financial risk is minimal. However, you may spend a great deal of your time and effort in an advertising medium that is not right for you. Managing MySpace and Facebook ads is significantly more time consuming.
•    The reporting capabilities of the advertising platforms are limited. For example, you can target ads based on gender, but you cannot get an ad-performance report by gender.
•    In many cases, edits to your campaigns are not allowed, so you must re-create your ad from scratch.
•    There are no bulk ad-creation tools. Each ad is its own campaign, with all targeting options set at the ad level.
•    The ad formats are completely different. While you can, for example, re-use your Google ad copy on Yahoo, you cannot re-use it on Facebook, because the character limits are different.

If none of this has deterred you, and you have the resources to invest in doing social network advertising right, you have a great opportunity. In fact, because of the issues I've described, the social networks are not saturated with advertisers, and prices are more favorable. If social network ads are a match for your needs, now is the time to get on board.

Ehren Reilly, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search-marketing tip to the Clickable Blog

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This article is part four of a four-part series on social network advertising. Get caught up on my three

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