By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-09-15 00:36:50 | Word Count: 664
According to an e-marketing website, Facebook now boasts over 500 million users. With those impressive numbers, who can deny the power social media advertising on the internet plays in this competitive and highly technical market? Even small business owners realize the power and the importance of having a website, or blog, some kind of presence on the web. In today’s professional world your business can potentially lose a level of credibility if you are asked for your website address, Facebook page or Twitter address and you do not have one. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a central tenant of internet marketing, which effectively serves to establish a brand; those actively engaging in onsite and offsite SEO processes are actually also engaging in Social Media Advertising.
Social Media Advertising is a form of online advertising that provides ‘targeted’ ads based on information supplied by a social media service. Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter collect basic contact info from their members, and will then encourage the new member to fill in other bits of information about themselves such as hobbies or interests. The more information the social media site receives, the more information is gathered and used to target social media.
[ advertisement ]
Currently, the company driving most of the growth is Facebook, where it is predicted that Social Media Advertisers will spend close to $1.3 billion worldwide this year to reach the web giant’s more than 500 million users. Research and polls have indicated that in 2010, Facebook could receive half of all social media spending in the United States and 39% of the social media spending worldwide. At the same time, MySpace has been diminishing in growth and users, and is expected to bring in only $297 million in social media spending worldwide, which would be a decrease of 14% from 2009.
If you are a business owner, it really doesn’t matter how big your business is for you to take advantage of advertising on social media sites. Creating a fan page to promote your business on Facebook is free and you may be surprised at the responses. Whether you are providing a service or selling products, you are practically guaranteed an increase in your customer base when you invest in advertising across social media platforms. No matter how much you are paying your Internet Marketing Company, it will be completely wasted if you don’t have a strong commitment to regular additions of unique (non-duplicate), highly relevant content. If the company you are interviewing does not stress this, or even mention it, then look elsewhere.
The best thing about advertising in the social media circuit is the ability to decide how much of your marketing and advertising budget you are willing to spend to hit your demographic. The more you are willing to spend using Social Media Advertising, the more customers you will be able to reach, and as more and more people around the world continue the growing trend of searching for goods and services online, it seems like a pretty safe bet.
