Marketers in the US spent 7.8% of their total online marketing budget on social media marketing in the third quarter of 2007. Social networking sites, realizing their advertising potential, have unleashed new and better advertising platforms to attract advertisers and developers alike.
Google recently announced the beta launch of its OpenSocial platform. Google gadgets are set to compete with Facebook’s recently introduced SocialAds. Social gadgets will work on many popular social networking sites, including Orkut, MySpace, hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, and SalesForce. Developers can now create multisite applications using HTML and JavaScript. Google’s portable social devices are poised to give the popular Facebook platform some stiff competition.
The OpenSocial platform opens up many possibilities, such as sharing your playlists of songs on iLike with your social network on Orkut. The gadgets stream live data from other websites without the user having to navigate away from the current site. With a large number of popular social networking sites partnering with Google, the platform should see rapid adoption. Webmasters and companies that create social networking sites can adopt the OpenSocial platform to take advantage of the large number of developers that will be able to create applications for them.
Facebook will have to rethink its strategy of having a walled development platform. Under Facebook’s new advertising strategy, advertisers can create free Pages for their products and services. These pages may contain interesting applications for download. Users can choose to become fans of an advertiser’s products or services. The Facebook beacon allows advertisers to add fan activity to the feed their friends receive on the home page. Facebook also announced the launch of SocialAds, which are text and image ads shown to a user’s friends when the user purchases or interacts with a product/service. Advertisers will receive analytics and reports on consumer response.
