Tag: facebook advertising

While advertising on these networks is considered to be vital a new survey questions their effectiveness.

Gallup has recently released the results of a social media marketing study that has suggested that this advertising channel is not nearly as effective as some of the leading networks – such as Facebook and Twitter – would have companies believe.

The recent “State of the American Consumer” report from the polling firm showed that few feel these ads work.

The Gallup poll results showed that only 5 percent of Americans feel that social media marketing has a considerable influence over the various products that they purchase. That said, a massive 62 percent of the survey participants felt that these ads had no effect at all on the decisions that they make with regards to purchasing. The survey involved the participation of 18,000 consumers in the United States.

The social media marketing study showed that offline interaction with brands were far more influential.

Participants in the survey stated that they were more heavily influenced by interactions with brands that occurred offline, such as those that occur during in-store visits and that they see in retail display windows. They felt that these were far more influential than ads that they saw over social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

It is expected that those social networks – and others – will be quite surprised by the findings, as will the brands that are expected to spend a total $11.4 billion on advertising over those two leading platforms by the close of 2014.

The Gallup report suggested that Americans are using their favorite social media platforms in order to interact with the people they know, and not necessarily the brands that they like. In fact, the publication suggested that those site users have learned to tune out the ads that are displayed in front of them while they use those social networks.

The social media marketing report said that “These channels do not motivate prospective customers to consider trying a brand or recommending a brand to others,” adding that “Therefore, if companies want to acquire new customers, their best bet is to engage their existing customers and inspire them to advocate on their behalf.”

The social network is working on appealing to this market through a promise of successful advertising.

In an effort to become more appealing to app development firms, Facebook has been testing an entirely new form of mobile ads service since at least the end of January, which provides advertisements directly to a certain handful of smartphone and tablet applications.

Now, that social network is starting to indicate that an official launch of the service may occur in April.

The suggestion has been made that the mobile ads service could be launched at the F8 developer conference, next month. This would make an offering to all app makers for an entirely new revenue source that had not previously been available through the social media giant. Until now, the platform simply wasn’t in a position to truly assist developers in being able to monetize their apps.

Facebook has now taken its time to develop a mobile ads service that it believes will promise success.

According to Ilya Sukhar, who is responsible for the oversight of developer efforts at Facebook, “That had to be figured out.” He went on to say that “There just generally was a period of time when the company, as has been widely reported, has been figuring stuff out [on mobile]. This is a signal that we think we’ve figured it out.”

He explained that assisting developers in being able to monetize their applications will be a central focus of the announcements that will be made next month at the conference. In the past, the F8s in the past were primarily focused on rolling out features on Facebook that were more consumer facing. This will be different, this year, as developers will be nearly the only focus of the event, according to Sukhar, who also added that it will “help folks build, grow, and monetize their apps.”

Monetizing is one of the largest struggles faced by mobile app development companies. As Facebook has considerable strength in monetizing attention, they are hoping to be able to combine those two environments through their mobile ads service, for mutual benefit between themselves and developers.