Social network advertising

Essential factors also include users' likes, comments, views, and follows on social media platforms.

Social media targeting enhances advertising by leveraging profile data to deliver ads directly to individual users.

People who use social networking sites share a variety of personal information data points about themselves, including their age, gender, interests, and location, and this stored information allows advertisers to create specific target groups and individualize their advertisements.

These traits include geographical location, gender, age, work, relationship status, and interests such as music.

[2] Facebook claims advertisers can customize their target audience based on their behaviour, such as purchasing patterns, device usage, and other activities.

[5] The programs evaluate how a consumer engages with the content based on the number of likes, followers, and specific interests of the user.

Facebook is the most popular social advertising platform, but an increasing number of young people use Snapchat.

Pew Research Center data show that 78% of young Americans (18–24 years old) use Snapchat, and 54% in the 25–29-year-old group.

Created in 2005, YouTube is now one of the most popular websites, with visitors watching around 6 billion hours of video every month.

[20][non-primary source needed] Within social communities, users provide demographic information, interests, and images.

A critical component of social media targeting is providing the users' demographic and interest information.

The availability of user data allows for detailed analysis and reporting, which is a significant part of social media targeting and what makes it more effective than statistical projections alone.

[21] Popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube offer different ways to advertise brands.

[23] A large portion of this revenue was from app install ads, which developers buy on a cost-per-install basis.

Some networks already involve buy buttons or are direct marketers for various products a business wishes to promote on its social media platform.

These buttons appear in advertisements which appear in the news feeds of social media interfaces and give users the option to purchase an item immediately.

In other words, brands need to set specific advertising objectives when creating online social media ads.

For example, this includes how many people were reached on a social media platform or how many mentions a brand had in a month.

[32] Social media advertising acts as a monitoring tool that provides quantifiable measures, such as the number of likes, shares, comments, opens, views, followers, or clicks, as indicators of engagement.

[34] A disadvantage for users and consumers in terms of internet privacy is the widespread use of web tracking techniques, which can serve to measure social media reach, but which allow the construction of complete personality profiles from ad viewing and clicking.

[35] Critics of social media advertising and marketing cite abuse in the areas of political interference, racism and stereotyping of groups, as well as undue influence in the shaping of values for unsuspecting young people.