Don’t Advertise on Social Media

This is an odd title for an agency’s blog post but check out this study by Exact Target and Ball State University reported by eMarketer showing social media behind word-of-mouth and even old fashioned email, as a preferred form of advertising. I have a theory as to why that’s so. When college students think of social media advertising, they think about the interruptive banner ads that appear on social networking sites and these are notorious for their abysmal click-through rates. Hey, as soon as they hear the word “advertising”, they automatically associate the word with any content that interrupts what they’re already doing. Content passed along by friends through social media is probably thought of as word-of-mouth and if you must think of the medium as a channel, that’s probably the best fill-in-the-blank to the statement, “Social media marketing is like _____ channel”

Source: Capital