Ad Impressions - YouTube, MySpace, Facebook

The awe-inspiring popularity of social networking has afforded companies a new and exciting avenue with which to reach potential customers, and some are utilizing it to evolve at unprecedented rates. Much has been written about the underwhelming page impressions to click thru rates of social networking advertising, but those obsessing themselves with such figures are likely missing the point.

Some want to dismiss social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter as unsustainable fads that will soon be supplanted by some other crazy new fad, yet the truth is in the numbers - and the numbers illustrate that it’s here to stay. According to Compete.com the number of unique MySpace visitors has hovered around a healthy 60 million per month since August of 2008, while the number of unique Facebook visitors has risen from 40 million in August 2008 to a staggering 122m this July.

That means a combined 180 million-plus unique users visited these two social networking giants alone in July. When adding other social networking sites such as YouTube, Twitter and Classmates.com into the equation, that number easily exceeds a quarter billion unique visitors per month. Such a number is difficult to grasp, but for those companies willing to develop social networking advertising campaigns it can mean this - $$$.

The hidden beauty of advertising on social networks isn’t the click thru rate, but, rather, the actual number of impressions. This is because when your advertisement is seen by hundreds of millions of people, odds are your target audience will be present somewhere in the lot. Thus, social networking advertising strategies are no different than those of other mass mediums like television and print, where the importance is not so much who is reached, but how many are reached.

The click thru rates of television advertisements would be low as well if viewers were asked to touch the screen when appealing ads aired, but this doesn’t dissuade companies from spending millions on commercials that air on Super Bowl Sunday. As many users of social networking sites visit their favorite sites on a daily basis, and as many of them spend several hours a day visiting countless pages of friends and acquaintances, advertising there enables companies to reach Super Bowl Sunday-like audiences on a daily basis.

Think of it this way. If someone offered you $1m to drop a beach ball off a ten-story building and hit any of the ten people waiting in the street below, chances are you walk away empty handed. But should that offer be to drop a golf ball off a hundred-story building with one million people waiting in the street below, you will more than likely walk away a millionaire. Such are your chances of reaching your target audience through social networking marketing campaigns. The odds are that good.

At the same time, Facebook and Myspace ads can be created with a strategy that allows advertisements to only be seen by people within very specific demographics. One tip when creating your ad campaigns on these networks is to try marketing not only to the masses, but also to a laser focused audience. This could include people in a specific city or those who have expressed a certain interest in something you offer. And, unlike most other forms of advertising, you choose the specs here. This tips the potential success rate in your favor.

Social Media and Social Network advertising is a lot like the “Wild West” right now. You may find some useful guidelines out there, but for the most part this is still uncharted territory. Keep your eyes peeled for a coupon or promo code, dust off your banner and saddle up!