Advertising on social
Paying to get your message in front of people on social media has some parallels to Google’s Pay Per Click service that we looked at previously, where you pay only for people who have searched for a term relating to your product and then clicked on your advert. But social goes one step further: you don’t need to wait for them to search before you know what they are interested in. Social media sites know more about us than we probably know about ourselves. They know not only what age we are and the area we live in, but they also know what music we like, what products we buy, what our political leanings are and where we went on holiday. Because their location services know where we are when we use their app, they might know that we regularly spend time in Starbucks even if we’ve never checked in online there. They know that there’s a good chance we will like similar things to our best friends, and they know who our best friends are and everything about them too.
For some people, this is too much. It’s an invasion of privacy. For others, we begrudgingly accept that we’re getting a pretty awesome service for free in return for being shown some adverts that are relative to us. Myself, I’m a fan of this kind of personalisation, but maybe because I remember the internet before personalisation was commonplace and how dire the adverts were that popped up then. If I’m going to HAVE to see some promotions (and I accept that I am) then I would much rather see things that have a chance of being of interest to me, as an ethical vegan. And in the main, that’s the ads I see.
Your standpoint on privacy may change once you’ve viewed social media from an advertiser’s point of view though. If you decide to delve into the world of paid social media advertising you will be agog at just how ‘granulated’ the targeting options are. You can set your advert to be shown to people in a certain location, but also say if this location is where they live or they just happen to spend time there. This is useful if your business gets a lot of footfall but is away from where your customers live. You can choose to put your message in the newsfeed of people based on their age, gender, special interests, hobbies, relationship status, job title, diet, level of education, and what brands they have interacted with in the past. So if you want to talk to female vegans, aged 30-50, who live in the affluent areas of York, who are married and like natural skincare and give them a link to your website – then you can. You can also imagine that if they are the only people you want to talk to, then it’s probably not going to cost you that much. With such targeted campaigns you can get results from just a few pounds a day. And the reverse is true – once you have proved that this strategy is working and delivering you customers by paying a few pounds a day, you can up your budget and target the same kinds of people but across the whole of the country, or even the world.
