By Nick Johnson - August 20th, 2013
Twitter as more than a broadcast medium, how visible digital ads really are and how the B2B sector is increasingly embracing social media.
Are your ads invisible?
With corporations pouring huge amounts of money into social media promotions, a new piece of research from comScore makes sobering reading. According to their research over half of all digital ads (54%) are never actually seen by their intended audiences.
Brands that have been using the click-through rates as they buy ad space as thousands of impressions may have to rethink their approach to digital ad placement, if the figures from comScore are accurate. Of course, the test is whether a potential customer views the ads themselves, which is where general ad impression metrics fall down.
The basis of the comScore results are based on the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, and some have pointed to the fact that it is not a comprehensive measure of ad success rates. What the comScore research does make clear is that brands need to do more to ensure their ads are visible, none more so than on social media networks.
B2B social media thriving
The B2C sector has been the focus of social media development since its inception, but a quiet revolution has been taking place in B2B as well. According to a new infographic from the Clearpoint Agency, over 80% of businesses operating in the B2B sector is using social media.
Twitter leads the pack of social media networks used most by the B2B sector, to gain the most new leads followed by Facebook. Brand awareness is the top reason for using social media networks with customer and lead acquisition closely following.
Said Bonnie Shaw, Clearpoint president and co-founder: “We believe it’s important for B2B companies to adopt social media if they haven’t already because it builds brand awareness, credibility and customer loyalty.”
It may have taken slightly longer for the B2B sector to understand what social media means for them, and what the rules of engagement are in this specialised area of business activity, but clearly social media is working for many B2B enterprises.
Social media is replacing search
How consumers find stuff online is changing. New figures from Blinkx suggest the much-coveted 18-34 year-old age group is increasingly using social media over organic search to locate the goods and services they are interested in.
The Nation of Sharers study that looked at the activity of 2,000 users across the UK also identified that older users in their 50’s are also increasingly using social media and more importantly, sharing what they find. This is also supported by research from Pew Internet that showed that older consumers are increasingly adopting social media into their lives.
Founder and chief strategy officer at Blinkx, Suranga Chandratillake, said: “The rise of social networks and the proliferation of powerful connected devices have profoundly changed the way that we interact with the web. We’ve become comfortable scanning and processing long streams of information - Facebook pages and Twitter feeds - a content universe delivered to us by our friends and the people we follow, and increasingly we’re accessing that content through tablets and smartphones.”
Until next time….
The Useful Social Media team.