ADOI Blog

ADOI BLOG: Social Media: Advertisers need to be there! by Matt Sutton – Managing Director, Aktiv Digital

admin2 on 04 19, 2010

The world gets more ‘social’ every day.

More and more people are spending more and more time engaging in social media online. According to the latest comScore figures, 50.8% of the total online population in the Asia Pacific region visited a social networking site in February 2010 – equating to around 400m people.  Facebook just last month surpassed 400m unique users globally just on its own platform.

Clearly, these kinds of media consumption trends have not gone unnoticed by advertisers.  Right now we find ourselves in the middle of a period where the advertisers are trying to nail down the right way to engage consumers in social media and the platforms themselves are looking at the right way to monetize the space.

Facebook has been successful in targeting SMEs through its self-serve platform, and has successfully created a forum for fans of brands to engage with consumers through fan pages and news feeds. This of course has led to brands questioning just what kind of content they put through these channels and how they can control user generated interactions.  There’s a short answer there: They can’t. The advantages of having real dialogue with their consumers should far outweigh any concern over negative feedback.

A recent debate has also been around the long-term customer value of having a fan in the first place.  The answer is pretty big; but as always, we’d like to put a number against it. Virtue, a specialist social media company, has attempted to place a concrete value on it and after their calculations, have come out the other end with a figure of $3.60 based on impressions in the Facebook news feed. The debate will no doubt continue.

Going forward, it’ll be interesting to see Twitter’s progress in monetizing its tweets while the entrance of RockYou into the APAC market providing access to apps and games on social media as well as guaranteed fans on Facebook is very exciting.

Social media; advertisers need to be there.

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