A new finding for digital agencies: Don’t pass up marketing on social networks

A report released this week by the The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and the Future Foundation presents and backs up an interesting finding: advertising agency growth could slow to just 1.2 percent per year by 2016 if the industry neglects marketing opportunities on social networks.

Despite this warning, we think that this report contains an important flip-side. Many agencies are heeding the call of new technology and creating successful digital marketing programs for their big-brand clients.

Why has this happened? We think it has to do in part with an industry realization that marketing on social networks presents a clear opportunity for maximizing measurable brand exposure.

More often than not, participants in social campaigns are highly active. And because of the reach of the social graph and the benefits of the network effect, these participants are empowered in such a way that they can automatically champion your message. For example: For every new individual who joins your Facebook campaign, your message — via Facebook profiles, shared videos, news feed stories, campaign pages, notification messages, and emails — is exposed to that individual’s friends — a brand new group of prospective influencers, customers, and fans.

Relatively speaking, such friend-to-friend marketing is much more effective than various forms of blanket, non-interactive advertising.

We’re excited to see more and more agencies become social network experts. And we’re excited to see this new area of marketing grow: as social networks and social application platforms add more features, this inevitably generates more opportunities for the sharing of branded content.

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