Consumers Wary of Ads on Social Media Sites

According to the Jupiter Research report, “Viral Marketing: Beyond Social Media,” summarized by Internet Retailer, most consumers don’t trust product information they get on social media sites. The survey determined that 69% of consumers don’t trust the product information they get on social media sites. Consumers were twice as likely to trust product information on a company web site or professional review site.

Consumers don’t like ads to begin with, and they especially don’t like ads on social media sites that interrupt them. Fred Stutzman had a terrific post on this recently when he spoke about advertising on social networks. One of his points was titled Ads - or, the interestingness problem:

The poor state of advertising in social networks is widely reported. Users don’t click through ads, rates are depressed - obviously something is amiss. The problem, as it happens, is in the nature of the medium.

We click on ads for a number of reasons; one of the predominant reasons is distraction. As we transverse the web and encounter different content, advertising often serves as a contextual escape. We grow tired with content, we exhaustively explore a topic - so we then click on ads. The problem with social networks is that the users of social networks fail to tire of the content.

A social network is largely based around actions (responding to messages, posting to walls, managing friendships) and experience (browsing and finding new people and content). In the state of action, it is hard to distract us - the management of our friend networks is vastly more valuable than time spent exploring advertisements. In the state of experience, we are exploring peer-produced content - which proves to be almost exhaustively interesting.

When we experience this content, we are learning about people, exploring networks, bringing more richness into our online and offline experiences. In this state, it is again extremely difficult to distract us with advertising. Put simply, the content we’re experiencing is too interesting - we don’t get distracted.

Fred I believe identifies one of the problems why so many companies are unsuccessful advertising on social networks, and thus my 69% of consumers don’t trust the product information that they see on social media sites.

Back to the Jupiter report and the ground braking conclusion that they reached:

Consumers may not convert on an ad viewed on a social media site, but the ad may drive them to search for additional information about a featured product in the ad. As a result, Jupiter advises, viral marketers using social media sites to advertise need to support the campaign with search engine campaigns and company web sites that serve up product information consistent with that found in social media in these more conventional online formats.

No kidding. Social media campaigns should be a component of a brand’s overall marketing strategy. SMO is not, and should not be a stand alone product or strategy.