Bite-Sized Digital Advertising Series: Telling Social Networking Sites Apart, Pt. 1
Welcome to the Bite-Sized Digital Advertising Series!
In today’s digital marketing article, we’ll be tackling the differences between seven of the most popular social media networking sites. This aims to guide people intent on trying out organic marketing and paid ads to figure out the type of content they’ll be creating for their marketing campaigns.
Let’s get started!
What is proprietary algorithm?
You’ll see this term throughout this article, and you’ll likely be wondering what it means.
Proprietary algorithms determine what users see on social media sites based on user profiles. These algorithms use information provided by the user, such as their search history, submitted content, and bookmarked posts, to identify and suggest similar content.
These algorithms also determine the order and frequency that users view or otherwise interact with these suggested content. Paid ads in social media networking sites, in this case, works either by multiplying the frequency of ad exposure, expanding the reach of ad exposure, or both.
Facebook is by far the most popular on this list. As of this writing, Facebook has a global user population of 2.45 billion accounts. These accounts range from personal accounts, commercial accounts, hobby pages, and specialty groups.
Facebook content comes in a variety of types, including text, video, and images. In terms of original content, Facebook has a lot of options, which can be overwhelming for new users at the beginning. Content access can also be filtered through customizable privacy settings.
Facebook has a native advertising system, with direct-to-Facebook payment methods. Advertisements can be in text, graphic, or video form; Facebook only facilitates the ad “reach” for paid ads, while organic marketing is handled by the site’s proprietary algorithm.
Twitter has a public recorded user population of 330 million as of 1Q 2019. Twitter separates itself from other social media platforms by being a primarily text-based website, with the option of uploading a limited number of images or videos. Twitter text posts, also known as tweets, have a limit of 280 characters, while uploaded videos have a limit of 140 seconds for general users and 10 minutes for professional users.
Twitter has two privacy settings – private and public. Twitter also verifies accounts of celebrities and notable living figures, making the website popular with pop culture and lifestyle enthusiasts. The website is also a popular news aggregator, as news reporting accounts like CNN and Reuters use the format for brief real-time updates of current events.
The social media site’s paid ads come in three forms: promoted accounts, promoted trends, and promoted tweets. There are various rates for each, with rates based on engagement and reach. Like with Facebook, these ads are subject to Twitter’s proprietary algorithm.
In the next article, we’ll tackle three more social networking sites to consider for online marketing. Stay tuned!
