computer science

Social network advertising

Social network advertising is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Social network advertising rather than just read about it. In short: Social network advertising, also known as social media targeting, is a group of terms used to describe forms of online advertising and digital marketing that focus on social networking services. Advertisers can use users' demographic information, psychographics, and other data points to target their ads.

Key takeaways

Social network advertising belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Social network advertising to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Social network advertising from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Social network advertising, also known as social media targeting, is a group of terms used to describe forms of online advertising and digital marketing that focus on social networking services. Advertisers can use users' demographic information, psychographics, and other data points to target their ads. Social media targeting combines targeting options (such as geotargeting, behavioural targeting, and socio-psychographic targeting) to make detailed target group identification possible. The signals used include users' likes, comments, views, and follows on social media platforms. Advertisements are then distributed on the basis of information gathered from target group profiles. Social network advertising differs from social media targeting. Social media targeting uses profile data to deliver advertisements to individual users, whereas social network advertising involves matching social network users to target groups specified by the advertiser. Social media advertising encompasses the creation of content on social media platforms, interaction with followers, and the placement of advertisements.

Application People who use social networking sites disclose personal information data points about themselves, including their age, gender, interests, and location, and this stored information allows advertisers to define target groups and to individualize their advertisements. Advertisers use it to reach audiences identified as interested in a product or service, and users may in turn see advertisements more closely matched to their interests. The data collected extends beyond demographics to the content a user has engaged with and the length of that engagement.

Facebook Facebook provides targeting tools that allow advertisements to be directed at a defined audience through the Facebook Ads product, which is available to individual users and to businesses. When an advertisement is placed through the Facebook Ad Manager, or the Meta Ads Manager, the advertiser selects characteristics that define the target market, among them geographical location, gender, age, occupation, relationship status, and interests such as music. Facebook states that advertisers can further refine an audience by behaviour, such as purchasing patterns and device usage, and that this makes advertisements less intrusive and better matched to their audience. The system also reports campaign performance, which advertisers can use to adjust the audience, budget, and duration of a campaign. Its campaign tools are free to access and reach a large user base, factors that have been cited as reasons for the platform's use by new advertisers.

Instagram On Instagram, companies can engage influencers, post from a corporate account, or buy advertising from Meta, Instagram's parent company. Advertising systems assess how a user engages with content, drawing on the number of likes, follows, and recorded interests, and select advertisements on that basis. Average daily use of the app has been reported at about 72 minutes.

LinkedIn LinkedIn was created as an online platform to help employers connect with potential employees. Its most common advertising format is sponsored content, which is used to distribute posts and company updates and to direct users to a landing page. Other popular formats include Thought Leadership ads and Document ads. Targeting attributes include location, company, job experience, education, demographics, interests, and traits, as well as custom audiences assembled through matched audiences.

WhatsApp In 2020, Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, announced that it would show advertising on the platform through WhatsApp statuses, in a format comparable to Instagram and Facebook stories.

YouTube According to figures attributed to Hootsuite, 45.8% of YouTube's total advertising audience is female and 54.2% is male.

Operation Within social communities, users provide demographic information, interests, and images. Social media targeting software draws on this information and enables advertisers to create display ads with characteristics matching those of social network users. Targeting on this basis increases the likelihood that a user sees advertisements related to their interests. The same data supports the analysis and reporting of campaign results.

Demographics As of 2014, about three-quarters of Internet users belonged to at least one social network. 49% of adult women in the United States visited social media sites a few times daily, compared with 34% of men. The fastest-growing age group on Twitter was 55 to 64, up 79% since 2012, while the 45–54 group was the fastest-growing on Facebook and Google+. Use was more common in the 18–29 age group, of whom 89% were Internet users, than among those aged 65 and over, of whom 43% were.

Types of advertising Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube each offer several formats for advertising brands. Facebook options include promoted posts, sponsored stories, page post ads, Facebook object (like) ads, and external website (standard) ads. Twitter formats include promoted tweets, promoted trends, and promoted accounts shown in users' news feeds. YouTube formats include branded channels, promoted videos, and video advertising. In July 2015, during its second quarter earnings call, Facebook reported $2.9 billion in mobile revenue, amounting to over 76% of its overall quarterly revenue. A large portion of this revenue came from app install ads, which developers buy on a cost-per-install basis. A further format is the buy button. Some networks incorporate buy buttons or act as direct marketers for products a business promotes on its social media presence, and Facebook and Twitter have entered such partnerships. The buttons appear within advertisements in social media news feeds and give users the option to purchase an item immediately. They accounted for just under 2% of online sales. The buy button has been traced to a system patented by Amazon in 1997. Social media advertising has also been used in political campaigns. Videos involving Barack Obama and John McCain during the 2008 presidential race attracted 1.45 billion views. Okazaki and Taylor have written that social media affects how a brand is received across international markets, and that this raises theoretical questions for research on international advertising.

Strategy

Social media advertising involves creating content on social media platforms, engaging with followers, and running advertisements.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Social network advertising

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Social network advertising claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Social network advertising before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Social network advertising ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Social network advertising

In research: Social network advertising appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Social network advertising in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Social network advertising is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Advertising, Digital marketing, Mass media monitoring, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Social network advertising outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Social network advertising in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Social network advertising means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Social network advertising out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Social network advertising in simple terms?

Why does Social network advertising matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Social network advertising?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Social network advertising.