By Rupert Staines, Managing Director, RadiumOne UK
As the sharing phenomenon arrives, Rupert Staines, managing director of RadiumOne UK discusses how advertisers can take advantage of it.
Everyday we’re experiencing the internet evolve into a social ecosystem, one in which people frenetically communicate, logging on every day to share content and have discussions with friends, families and colleagues. Even Facebook has observed that the rate its users are sharing is increasing exponentially.
Zuckerberg recently explained that the average Facebook user is sharing twice as much today as they did a year ago, with four billion ‘things’ being shared every month. In fact we are sharing over 30 billion things a month across the open web and what this means for advertisers, is that they have to change their approach to reaching and engaging with these consumers — but how can they take advantage of this new social media landscape?
It’s possible to harness this sharing phenomenon by understanding that social connections matter when it comes to online advertising. You can even improve targeting by building a consumer’s online profile based on what their friends like too. Facebook has had some success in this area but even its 'Social Graph' has a limit to what it can offer. The next phase in online advertising is to look at the content that is being shared and apply a weighting to how frequently and recently it is happening, not just the one dimension of what consumers are interested in. However, this requires a significant change in thinking, and turning existing practices on their heads.
Online advertising is no longer about following users around the web, but becoming part of the conversation and accompanying the user based on their interests, influence and closest connections.
By creating a bottom up approach, advertisers can turn the sales funnel upside down, helping them target ever increasing numbers of relevant consumers by building out the audience based on the interests of just a few. By taking the fewer connections that are much more meaningful and closer to the consumer, defining those by the amount of information interaction they are sharing, and based on this, scaling out those connections by understanding their next closest connections etc, advertisers can drive a more defined and socially engaged audience into the customer funnel.
With improved scale and targeting, advertisers will yield better performance and insight from online campaigns. By embracing the new ‘Share Graph’ concept, advertisers can deliver more relevant content to a more receptive audience, achieving higher click through rates and a better return on investment.
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