US marketers spent 7.8% of their total online marketing budget on social media marketing in Q3 2007. Social media sites realizing their advertising potential have unleashed newer 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 unveiled SocialAds. Social gadgets will work across many popular social networking sites including Orkut, MySpace, hi5, LinkedIn, Ning and SalesForce. Developers can now build multi-site applications using HTML and JavaScript. Google’s portable social gadgets are poised to give tough competition to the widely popular Facebook platform.
OpenSocial platform opens up many possibilities like sharing your song playlists 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 wide number of popular social media sites partnering with Google, the platform should see fast adoption. Webmasters and businesses building social media sites can adopt the OpenSocial platform to benefit from the large number of developers who will be able to build applications for them.
Facebook will have to rethink its strategy of having a walled development platform. Under the new ad strategy from Facebook, advertisers can create free pages for their products and services. These pages can host interesting applications for download. Users can choose to become fans of an advertiser’s products or services. Facebook’s beacon allows advertisers to add fans activities to news feed their friends receive on the home page. Facebook also announced the lauch of SocialAds, which are display and text ads shown to a user’s friends when the user purchases or interacts with a product/service. Advertisers will be provided with analytics and reports about consumer response.
