Bite-Sized Digital Advertising Series: Telling Social Networking Sites Apart, Pt. 3
Welcome to the Bite-Sized Digital Advertising Series!
Today’s article is the third and last of the social networking sites sub-series. In this article, we’ll tackle three specialized social networking sites and platforms that have nonetheless made a big splash in recent years. These sites and platforms – LinkedIn, Reddit, and Snapchat – round out our mini-series on the top social networking sites to advertise on based on their audience reach.
Let’s get to it!
LinkedIn, which first went live back in 2003, is a business-oriented website that connects employers with current and prospective employees through professional networking. In plainspeak, the website allows professionals to create a work profile that showcases their skills and achievements, which in turn are accessible to potential employers. As of 2019, the website has an average monthly global user population of 300 million.
Advertising on LinkedIn is fairly straightforward – advertisers can target their ads based on job title, industry, region, or other factors. These ads will then appear on LinkedIn users’ dashboards. LinkedIn advertising costs can be budgeted per day or per campaign, and advertisers can set the maximum amount they’re willing to bid for a Pay-per-Click ad’s keyword visibility. As well, LinkedIn offers Pay-per-Send email advertising, which sends sponsored advertising emails to users that fall under your target demographic (advertisers pay for how many emails are sent out, not how many are clicked and read).
Net-savvy news enthusiasts will be familiar with Reddit, a site that is touted as the front page of the internet. Reddit is formatted similarly with early 2000s era forums and discussion boards, where users post original or aggregated content that other users can comment on through threads on the post. Originally formatted as a social news aggregator, the website has expanded to original content, user interaction systems (upvotes and downvotes), and native advertising.
Like the other sites and platforms featured in this mini-series, Reddit’s targeted advertising focus is primarily based on user interests, displaying ads on topic-relevant boards; this means that, for example, car-related advertisements show up on Reddit boards focused on the topic. Reddit has an average monthly active user population of 330 million. Ad pricing is based on exposure and reach, starting as low as USD $5.00 per sponsored link.
Snapchat
Unlike the other entries to this mini-series, Snapchat is a messaging app that only stores messages like texts and photos for a limited amount of time. Because of the ephemeral nature of its user-generated content, Snapchat encourages a near-constant app usage among its users.
Snapchat’s user demographic originally focused on young professionals sharing adult content, but has gradually shifted over to family-friendly content. With this shift, its user base also shifted; as of 2019, majority of Snapchat’s 210 daily average user population are in the 12-22 years old age bracket.
Advertising on Snapchat is similar to Instagram’s format, where advertisers can upload brief video snippets (also known as “Stories”) to engage users in promoting or purchasing their products or services. As well, Snapchat ads are bid on based on exposure and ad reach, which can be further fine-tuned based on target demographic.
Snapchat rounds off the mini-series list, and with that, we’ve reached the end of the article! Digital marketing through social media share similarities across the board; we hope this mini-series has helped in outlining the differences between the major platforms and sites, and help advertisers figure out which site or platform is best suited for their business.
Stay tuned for more articles on digital advertising!
