The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff

9Get Your Message Across

As we introduced in Chapter 5, “Social Network Marketing,” online social networks allow advertisers to achieve new levels of precision and social distribution with hypertargeting and word of mouth. Hypertargeting provides marketers a way to hone in on very specific audience segments who are most likely to be interested, reducing the number of wasted ad impressions. Hypertargeting techniques can also be used to tailor custom campaigns to make ads feel more relevant and personal to the people viewing them. Passive word-of-mouth broadcasts across friend groups and the social graph multiply the distribution effects of these campaigns. Word of mouth also brings the credibility and personal touch of social filtering to marketing ...