Engage Vs Advertise On Social Media - Is This An Option At All?
We’ve been hearing a lot about social media ads and how they will grow by 44% in 2009-10. While we have been digital media evangelists all along as a social media agency we have always felt that social media is a medium to engage and not to advertise.
It is for this very reason that as an agency we have taken a stand to do only engagement oriented work rather than advertising oriented work. The way we think about it is the following:
1) Static web = Static Ads
2) Rich Media Web = Rich Media Ads
3) Social Media Web = Social Ads? Or Engagement led conversations?
We feel most marketers need to grapple with the third point above and take a call on where do they invest their social media budgets. Do they do it on ads which are perishable or do they invest in building a community where the ROI is not clicks but no of brand interactions. We have earlier asked this question as well in our clicks vs conversations debate.