OPINION: Reality or Fallacy?

175MM users every 24hours in Facebook, 30MM tweets everyday and counting, more than 3.5Bn pieces of content shared on Facebook, over 20 per cent of natural results indexed by Google churning out user generated content, 56MM people in Facebook play games daily, more than 700 Bn videos viewed in YouTube in 2010... it is definitely not a daunting task to pull out mind blowing statistics about Social media as there is no dearth for such information. Marketers across the world are slowly getting on board the bandwagon, trying to get a piece of action in their marketing plans that can be flaunted in board room huddles.

But with all this brouhaha, does advertising in social environments cater to the objectives of the specific initiatives? One of the most touted about advertising formats is the social ads program in Facebook and it is being actively promoted within the marketer circles. Within the limited scope of this column, we focus on the demand generation aspect of social media and try to delve deeper in to whether social ads indeed caters to an online demand type program and in a future column look at other social media tactics in relation with objectives of the online programmes tied to it.

In a recent initiative by a leading regional airline brand, Facebook was utilised to drive loads for a certain domestic origin-destination sector combination within a country when the demand for that sector was not exactly encouraging. Since the timeline for launching this initiative was not more than two days, which is not a very uncommon situation in our industry, the crack plan was to develop quick social ads and propagate them within Facebook and hope to achieve a significant demand spike towards the objective of the program (which incidentally had a price off type offer as well).

To develop Facebook creative and run a program is simple enough but how to ensure that the objective satiation is also attained? Let us look at various parts of the system flow that made the campaign a candidate for the above mentioned 'board room song and dance':

1. Targeting — smart targeting filters within the Facebook environment to ensure that there is minimal media spill over. Filters targeting the exact geo-locations for that sector along with fitting demographic filters were applied to ensure that the limited budgets were not frittered away. What deserves mention also is the fact that in addition to the filters available, 'messaging was also used as the filter' by highlighting the 'sector' in the ad copy, but targeted to the entire country which was a bold move.

2. Messaging — in addition to the above, three different types of ad copy was developed; one with sell up of the destination, another with sell up of the new fleet and another with sell up of the urgency.

3. Analytics and Tracking — sophisticated bidding tools which can track visitor click stream funnel from click to the final conversion was deployed to for robust tracking and intelligent optimization. It is important to remember that all leading bid management software companies have developed APIs for Facebook marketing recently

To say that the demand spike was indeed a reality as a result of the three critical factors above would be stating half of the story. The more exciting half of the story is the fact that the ads which were targeted at the entire country, but with 'messaging as the filter' contributed to 50 per cent of the conversions on the site; leading to the exciting discovery that irrespective of where audience is located, they still tend to book tickets between an unrelated sector, provided the sector has an exciting destination.

What does this mean for marketers?

Smart targeting, straightforward but relevant messaging and most importantly, robust tracking can bring in the moolah irrespective of whether the environment is social or otherwise. After all, social media is just an environment where the same audience who you target using multiple media thrive, but in a totally different mind set and involvement level.