August 2009

Why Social Media Advertising Doesn't Work !

Most of us have been on social media and networking sites, how many ads have you clicked?... None, you aren't alone.

Millions of people swarm to social networking sites on a daily basis missing every commercial ad in their way in an aim for general banter or self-promotion, the world is becoming an expert at it.

The fact is social networking sites are a place for people to gather and not a place to shop. Social networkers are not interested in buying, they hardly have the time to take a second glance at a group, forum or tweet they joined even yesterday.

As soon as a user arrives on social networking site they are often presented with excessive and meaningless items. A study of networks like Linkedin show that people with 400 or 500 contacts are only actively in touch with a few people. The rest are just for show. It would have been better for the Internet if social networking sites had never been invented, eliminating a huge volume of clutter for search engines to trawl.

A study of Twitter conducted by scientists at Hewlett-Packard found that while someone may have hundreds of followers, they are likely to have only a small number of close contacts. As they put it: "Attention is the scarce resource in the age of the Web. Users faced with many daily tasks and a large number of social links default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention".

Some companies view these places as being useless in terms of where to advertise. Some of these social networking sites are so important to people that they don't dare click on an ad from another member, fearing that they could be banned for compromising their membership.

Most social networking traffic is useless for keen advertisers, thousands of pounds paid for ads on Facebook, Badoo, Myspace, and similar sites become a big waste of money.

Other companies pay through the nose and advertise with high volume traffic sites. This was one of the original ways to advertise online and could be a better alternative to Social Media Advertising.

Now, the question remains, will social network advertising make us any money, or are we just fooling ourselves?...

John Rother
Design Brothers

<< Back

"It would have been better for the Internet if social networking sites had never been invented, eliminating a huge volume of clutter for search engines to trawl"