Advertising on social networks brings challenges as well as opportunities.
Highly personalized targeting, payment by results and organic sharing by users all make social media advertising sound attractive, but the format has its limitations. It can be difficult to measure how people respond, both quantitatively and qualitatively. It can also be difficult to use the format while sticking to legal requirements and overcoming user irritation.
Conciseness
Writing an advertisement for a social media location requires a concise approach posting in a short space in sites like that provided by Facebook and in particular the famed 140 characters of Twitter. Even if you can encapsulate a message in a short slogan, you may struggle to get across full detailed and legal disclaimers in this short space where "small print" is often impossible. In 2013 the FTC explicitly warned that social media advertisers were responsible for including all legally required disclaimers and gave a stark warning that if you couldn't do this in a particular format, then you shouldn't use that format.
Intrusiveness
While advertising is widely expected in media such as print and broadcast and in display form on websites, the jury is still out on public attitudes to social media advertising. One limitation is that many social networks took time to build up advertising, with some users getting used to the idea of the services being largely ad-free -- making them resentful when ads start appearing. Another is that the highly targeted nature of social media ads can mean users find the ads intrusive. This annoyance can make it more difficult for individual advertisers to create a good impression.
Measurability
One of the key advantages of online advertising is that you can find out exactly how many people come to your site from an ad on a specific Web page. This can be much trickier with social networking where the visitor comes from a link from a particular tweet or status update that could be listed on one of many different feeds or timelines. A further limitation comes from the fact that users may be following a link while using one of many third-party applications to read updates rather than visiting the social media website in question. Twitter conceded some of these limitations in September 2011 when announcing the introduction of specialist Web analytics tools.
Sentiment
It can be tempting to simply measure the number of people who mention your company on social media following an advertisement and assume this is a sign of its success. The problem is that this doesn't take account of what people are actually saying about you: having lots of discussion may be a bad thing if they are mocking or condemning your campaign. Trying to make sense of this can require complex tools that try to automatically detect tone, a process known as sentiment analysis. Even this can be limited by people using sarcasm and irony when mentioning your firm.
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