By: Michael Gagliardi
Advertising is the act of drawing attention to a particular product or service. Some businesses hire outside agencies to help them while others decide to take it into their own hands. There are a surplus of ways to get the attention of consumers to make them potential customers. Billboards, radio and T.V. commercials, fliers, and product placement in movies are all common places to see or hear advertisements. In the last 10 years a new surge of advertising has taken over with the recent advancements in technology and social media.
According to a study done by The Pew Research Center 70 percent of adults have at least one form of social media. They go on to say that those adults spend an average of 2-3 hours a day scrolling through different platforms. According to the Search Engine Journal Instagram has over 1 billion monthly users while Tik Tok has just over 1.2 billion. If you were to add the number of monthly users for both of these platforms it would still not add up to the amount that facebook has. Facebook has the most monthly users at 2.5 billion, which is 32 percent of the world’s population.
Ana Gotter of Disruptive Advertising claims Facebook is the best social media platform to advertise on. The price of a Facebook advertisement is based on the number of people who view the ad on their timeline. There is also interest based targeting which means if people follow similar pages there is more of a chance they will see the ad. This feature saves the business money because they are only paying for people to see the ad if they are most likely already interested. This is a great tool to help reach the businesses target audience. Billboards, commercials, and fliers are easily missed by consumers and businesses waste money for people to not notice.
Instagram is another popular website to buy advertisements on. In 2020 Instagram was the sixth most visited website and had the fourth most users of any smartphone application. The price for an instagram advertisement is a minimum of five dollars per day but will go up if there are more than that amount of engagements.
As reported by The Pew Research Center 53 percent of companies who participated in the survey said that they saw a “Major impact” in customer engagement. This means that more potential clients have seen the company’s page. The study also shows that 11 percent of the businesses saw a major rise in sales due to social media ads while 39 percent saw a minor increase. This means social media advertising was beneficial to 50 percent of the companies who were surveyed.
Works Cited
“Current World Population.” Worldometer, www.worldometers.info/world-population/.
Gotter, Ana. “The 5 Most Sales-Effective and Cost-Effective Ad Types in 2019.” StackPath, Disruptive Advertising , 30 Aug. 2019, www.disruptiveadvertising.com/ppc/cost-effective-ad-types/.
Kellogg, Kristi. “The 8 Biggest Social Media Sites for Marketing.” Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Journal, 11 Feb. 2021, www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media/biggest-social-media-sites/#:~:text=1%20Facebook.%202%20Twitter.%203%20LinkedIn.%204,Instagram.%205%20Snapchat.%206% 20Pinterest.%207%20Reddit.
“Reach More People with Instagram Ads.” Instagram for Business, business.instagram.com/advertising-guide.
Thomson, Kristin, et al. “Section 4: Social Media Use.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, Pew Research Center, 31 Dec. 2019, www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/01/04/section-4-social-media-use/.
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