Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and a host of other social networking sites were created for personal use. All of these companies require revenue to operate so it’s been interesting to watch them pick and choose their revenue path. Like any perilous journey, if you guess wrong on the direction you take your enterprise, it can quickly become obsolete. Do you still have your My Space account?Long term survival for these companies have forced their attentions to “the land of milk and honey”- the world of business and those big juicy ad budgets.
Their big marketing pitch to us business types is compelling. Businesses have spent six decades throwing ad dollars at a big broadcast media wall to see what sticks. Now, social media offers a more refined wall to it throw at. Actually it’s not that bad. The digital media wunderkinds that conjure up new algorithms to create revenue models to sustain their social media companies, are coming tantalizingly close to offering businesses a truly great opportunity to target their advertising dollars.
Social media companies have always had their hands full trying to convince advertisers that their media channels were neither the exclusive domain of attention deficit teens, nor Silicon Valley hipsters. Slowly but surely the important role of social media has taken root in the business community. Social media has become a mainstay in the lives of most consumers including consumers that also happen to be business owners. Hence a comfort level in spending ad dollars on social media, and a downright giddiness at the prospect of getting a message right under the nose of a targeted consumer.
It’s no surprise that Facebook has lead the way in attracting ad dollars. They are perfecting the art of placing your ad in front of prospective customers without the use of cookies like Google uses. Their Custom Audiences feature that they introduced in 2013 allows an advertiser to model the audience by demographics and basic interests. They expanded the feature to allow an advertiser to import a contact database and match emails as well as phone numbers. If you have other data points like age, gender, and interests, simply divide your lists up into those separate groups along with your customized message for each group. And bingo, you have virtually dropped a message onto the Newsfeed of the exact customer in which you intended. (Remember that Facebook gives much higher ad placement to video content.)
There are certainly other social media channels that are making their mark with ad dollars, but Facebook is probably the whole package for those businesses that want to get on board. If you want to create a social media strategy, call us at 702-682-8300. Start targeting tomorrow’s patients, today!
