Adding Social Targeting to Audience Targeting

Emerging research is building a case for the integration of social media into ad targeting strategy. This evolving area of targeting is referred to in a few ways, namely social media targeting or just simply social targeting. Social targeting is involves targeting ads to users based on their social behavior, such as Facebook ‘likes’, posts and Twitter tweets. Social media data is an ever evolving array of fragmented data. I’ve commented earlier how social is a very noisy medium and everyone is struggling to decipher some signal out of the noise.

Long are the days of generic ad targeting, or even further generic audience targeting based on a few core demographic characteristics. But how can we integrate social targeting to the audience targeting world? One approach that we are taking here at Crowd Science is to use our research methodologies to build an online social persona. These personas may take many shapes, including categorizing groups of individuals as social influencers and social addicts. The premise here is to evolve these various personas while attempting to gain insights into their habits, behaviors, motivators and drivers. We can then utilize this data to turn these profiles into targetable audience segments.

We are driving this a step further by providing the ability to build very specific micro-segments such as ‘connected students’, ‘social influencer technophiles’, or ‘online social addicted grandparents’. Using this kind of hypersegmentation provides audience segments that have exponentially more value to advertisers than traditional methods.

Below is a sneak peek at what we’re going to be adding to our SEGMENT + TARGET components of our CITRUS platform in the next feature release. This new functionality allows online publishers to take any of their existing segments and socialize them using this model. It is a just sneak peek (we had to hold a little back to keep our marketers happy), so drop us a line or keep us in your twitter feed to get updates on the socialization of audience targeting.

Social Targeting

 

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