Social network advertising, also social media targeting is a group of terms that are used to describe forms of online advertising that focus on social networking services. One of the major benefits of this type of advertising is that advertisers can take advantage of the users' demographic information and target their ads appropriately.
Social media targeting combines current targeting options (like geotargeting, behavioral targeting, socio-psychographic targeting, etc.), to make detailed target groupidentification possible. With social media targeting, advertisements are distributed to users based on information gathered from target group profiles.
Social network advertising is not necessarily the same as social media advertising. Social media targeting is a method of optimizing social media advertising by using profile data to deliver advertisements directly to individual users. Social media targeting refers to the process of matching social network users to target groups that have been specified by the advertiser.
Popular social media sites, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, offer different ways to advertise brands. Facebook gives advertisers options such as promoted posts, sponsored stories, page post ads, Facebook object (like) ads, and external website (standard) ads. To advertise on Twitter there are promoter tweets, trends, and promoted accounts that show up on users newsfeeds. For advertising on YouTube there are branded channels, promoted videos, an in video advertising.[2]
In July 2015, during their Q2 earnings call, Facebook revealed that it achieved $2.9B in mobile revenue, amounting to over 76% of its overall quarterly revenue. [3] A large portion of this revenue was from app install ads, of which developers buy on a Cost per Install basis.
