When we entered in the business of Social Media, little we knew that in the process of building a sustainable business we would be witnessing a major phase shift on world wide web, and hopefully will be a part of it. We were blessed to spend our time understanding human behavior on these social platforms and finding ways to link all these conversations to find some meaningful data.
Conversations vs Pageviews
“Conversation is an exercise of the mind; gossip is merely an exercise of the tongue.”
Till date the web is a place where people find content and services which can help them. The real core value proposition of having conversation with strangers and being a truly global society seems to fade away in all these noise.
Then came the concept of user generated content which started making sense, in last 5 years. Social Media interestingly moved to listening, measuring and responding to insightful data around products and services. Consumer evangelism and identifying passion, creating cause and driving communities around came as a part and parcel of the entire phenomenon.
Slowly, the sentiments became more important than the actual content, thus, enabling the power of social context to change the way we search, read and intake information on world wide web. Web had always sailed on the shoulders of traffic or we often call – page views. Money Metrics was always driven by the amount of unique content a portal has. No doubt that this helped web to scale up to the position where it is and is still driving the inter-webs, but it also produced so much of noise that real contextual data became really hard to find. This felt a need to change the way in which search engines spider and indexed content. But nobody really knew how ?
Then came the era of social media , user generated content and contextual weight of links. All the metric tools started putting conversations as a base, which was directly related to a contextual reach of content. Thus, finally creating a much needed shift in web or I would say a shift to web 3.0 (if that exists, somewhere!). Several tools, such as radian6, sm2, viralheat and half a dozen more, started to focus on people rather than the reach. Brands finally found a way of listening to customers and actually understand what they really want.
Birth of Social Advertising
Among all these radical shifts , the biggest concept we will see emerging will be of Social Advertising and it may challenge google’s core business. It’s a no-brainer to understand that Facebook sits in the center of social advertising phenomenon and it’s catching fast with it’s social facebook ads. There are few very interesting case studies on facebook ads, which showcase how contextual advertising brought more revenues than the normal adwords based campaigns. Adhustler carried out a comparison of adwords based campaign and facebook contextual campaign. Facebook ultimately gave 1/10th of CPM adwords gave. You may read complete case study here. (However, author failed to mention actions figure from these campaigns, which would be really helpful in determining actual ROI from facebook social ads).
Now, after facebook has establised itself as a major player in advertising network. They are moving towards ranking world wide web on the theme of google pagerank. Social Media practitioners and advocates, Gauravonomics and Chris Messina mentioned a detailed study of facebook open graph likes vs google link back pagerank system.
Social advertising is a clear win over traditional advertising on pay per click advertising models, because a granular level targetting, which a social context can provide can never be achieved via targetted ads on pay per click services. However, facebook ads are pretty new and unless it’s used upto a large level like google adwords, a comparison on CPC would be unfair.
If you’re interested to evaluate your chances of success with Social Advertising, do get in touch with us. We at Media Redefined work day & night to figure out what works best for whom. Be it a product, service, event or just an idea – we love to sit with you and see how can we help your business with social media. See ya!
