Why Social Media? Because You Can’t Aim any Better

Marketing is about taking a great product or service, identifying who would best benefit from it (and pay for it), crafting a persuasive message and putting that message in front of the right people.

This week we are talking about the top reasons why you have to include social media in your marketing toolkit. Yesterday we discussed how your (prospective) customers and competitors are both using social media. Today, we are going to talk about targeting. Social media offers advertisers and marketers the highest level of targeting available.

Targeting on Facebook

Facebook has revolutionized targeting. When a young woman gets engaged, the first thing she does is change her Facebook relationship status to “Engaged” and tell every company that wants to sell wedding services that she is planning her wedding. Add that to the fact that she gave Facebook her geographic demographics when she signed up as well as her age. Facebook advertisers can now target genders, age group, geographic demographics, and interests. Never before has any other media offered this level of targeting.

Targeting on Twitter

Twitter began to follow Facebook’s advanced targeting model. Advertisers on Twitter can now target their account and tweets by keyword, interests, geography, gender and similarity to existing followers. Besides these parameters, tweets can also be targeted by device type and keyword search results.

These two platforms have offered advertisers and marketers a new level of targeting opportunities that has never existed before. As new platforms come to be and existing ones develop, we can expect to see a new level of targeting sophistication. The second reason for you to include social media in your marketing toolkt is that you can now put your message directly in front your exact target demographic.