Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Social Advertising: A Potential Online Advertising Game Changer

Online display advertising has been in a steady decline recently, with fewer people clicking and interacting with those advertisements everywhere. For the most part, the industry has responded by making the display advertisements more immersive, with rollover states, forms, pull-down menus, expandable units, and streaming audio and video clips all built within them.

Those incremental innovations help grab users’ attention and provide a decent return on investment (ROI) for the advertisers. But social advertisements, which infuse social content and a user’s social graph (mapping of the person’s friends) directly into the ad unit, promise to make display advertisements far more interactive, engaging, and better performing than other forms of display advertisements that have come before.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau defines a social ad as “an online ad that incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed to display and be shared. The resulting ad displays these interactions along with the user’s persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content.” This definition serves as a good starting point but can be expanded to also include user-generated content.

To explain this in layman’s terms, imagine seeing a display advertisement on a website like CNN.com or NYTimes.com and uploading a photograph to it. Or you could see tweets (Twitter messages) by other people appear within it, and you could respond with ...