Why Brands Need To Look Beyond Social Networking For Consumer Engagement

22/10/2009

By Liane Dietrich, MD of The Affiliate Network LinkShare, explains why brands need to look beyond social networking for consumer engagement

In recent years, the web has become an increasingly valuable and profitable revenue stream for advertisers. As consumers spend more and more time online, searching the internet, shopping for deals and interacting on social networks this has created new opportunities for brands to advertise their goods and services. In fact, statistics released last month from the Internet Advertising Bureau have shown that the internet has overtaken television to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK*, growing by 4.6%...

...in the last six months alone.

To maximise the revenue opportunity on the internet, brands need to understand how their target audience uses the web and how to capture its attention. To find out which types of adverts appeal most to people online, we conducted a survey of 2000 consumers earlier this year** which looked at a range of advertising formats and the different ways that consumers interact with them. Given that social networks are now more popular than ever, our results were perhaps somewhat surprising. According to the research, only 4% of those surveyed had ever clicked through on a banner advert displayed on a social networking site. In addition we found that just 5% of respondents considered adverts placed on personal social networking sites such as Facebook as helpful in assisting their decisions on the web and this was even less for professional social networks such as LinkedIn at 5%.

This current low audience interaction suggests that adverts being used on social networks are not yet sufficiently engaging enough to encourage consumers to interact with them. Nevertheless, on the flip side, less than a fifth of respondents considered the adverts an active interference to... continued on page two >

 

 

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