Advertising in Social Networks

It's well known that Social Networking Activity is growing enormously worldwide.

An interesting study provided by Datamonitor predicts within the next four years there will be 107 millions members of Social Networks in Europe - compared to a current total of 41,7 mio Europeans.

The European Ranking is:
No 1: UK is the leader with 6 million users growing up to 27,1 mio in 2012.
No 2: France follows with current 8,9 mio users increasing up to 21,3 mio in 2012.
No 3: Germany currently has 8,6 mio users growing up to 21,7 mio of users in 2012.
No 4: Spain has 2,9 Social Network users and is very likely to reach 7,3 mio within the next four years.

This enormous growth introduces significant opportunities for today's marketers assuming that they have the right strategies in place. Marketers who would like to be successful need to know which kinds of advertising formats are effective within Social Networks.

The survey Community Effects 2008 has verified that sponsored music, viral videos and games are most accepted by community members. "A particularly promising strategy is a combination of decently communicated advertising messages, a high fun factor and the possibility to communicate indirectly with other users."

More than every second questioned participant evaluates music-clips (59%) and video-campaigns (51%) as a throughout positive advertising medium. On the contrary, most community users reject classic contests (30 %) and implored Flash-Layers (31 %).