Marketers Are Watching Social Networks & Reading Your Posts!

Tech Savvy marketers are using Social Networking for targeted advertising.  With Facebook you can target ads for Facebook users based on job, income, location, hobbies and a wide range of other criteria for the Pay Per Click ad campaigns.  Another unique 'feature' we found some marketing companies use is a 'sniffer' that automatically browses facebook posts for specific keywords or phrases to include users who match the criteria in targeted marketing campaigns.

This only works if the Facebook user has privacy settings shared for their email address and 'wall posts' otherwise there is no way an automated program could capture the proper information.  To verify our suspicions we had two of our website experts login to separate Facebook accounts to post status updates about interest in seeing the new TRON movie released December 17th 2010.  Both accounts are setup to share contact information, wall posts and interests and both accounts ended up receiving direct emails (via email, not through Facebook) from the same company advertising TRON movie night tickets.

The advertisement on the left was from a theater in 'East Taunton, MA' that sent direct emails to BOTH Facebook user's email addresses listed on the individual accounts after they posted interest in the TRON movie within 1 day of the post.  It would have been a genius method of targeted marketing had the additional qualifier of LOCATION been added to the mix since neither website developer in Kansas City plans on flying out to Massachusetts to see the movie!

What this illustrates is the power of targeted marketing using Social Networking and the Internet in general.  No other advertising medium provides the same potential and nowhere but the Internet do users share such a wide range of personal (and purchase) information.  Any company providing Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click Marketing should be studying trends, algorithms, interactions and usage to properly plan and implement solutions for customers. 

The SEO, SEM and Social Marketing Experts at Internet Builder Consulting have led the way innovating and teaching online marketing since 1999 with constant research to keep our customers ahead of the competition!

Robert 'Dot Com' Jackson
Internet Builder Consulting - Building BETTER Websites, Social Marketing and Online Solutions since 1995
816-842-7774 Office