What is the value of information flow advertising

Early January 21, 2015, some netizens found that their friends ' circles were "plugged in" to a message from the account name "micro-trust team". This information is displayed in the same way as ordinary information, but the word "promotion" is more in the upper right corner and the "I am not interested" button is also provided. In this circle of friends, the micro-credit team implicitly expressed the design intent of the product with six text maps.

This is actually a test, testing the user's acceptance of the circle of friends, the results of the micro-letter team relieved: more than 60% micro-users to maintain neutrality, 20% more positive response, only 10% or so negative attitude.

This is based on the content of the interest push, within the user's acceptance.

What is the information flow advertisement?

This message has a special name for "information flow (Feeds) advertising". As the name suggests, is the advertisement that appears in the social media user friend dynamic. It appeared on social giant Facebook as early as 2006, followed by Twit ter, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn, as well as social media such as QQ space, Weibo and Renren.

Information flow advertising is the process of buying and interacting with a high level of social platforms, with the user's good, can be shared, can be commented on the characteristics, these characteristics determine it in a very natural way into the user's friend dynamic, there is a very high reach rate. By advertising in the information stream, Facebook has been challenged by the lack of a mobile ad, and now has 62% of its revenue from mobile advertising. With the rise of mobile advertising and the maturity of social media, it is predicted that the 2015 will usher in a burst of information flow advertising.

Launch is the door to technical work

The launch of information flow advertisement is a complicated technical job.

Facebook, for example, has a dedicated ad team that picks out about 10 of the millions of ads a day to send to users ' friends, a dynamic and complex process that ensures the interests of advertisers and ensures a lossless user experience.

First of all, according to the university, the location of the job, you can quickly reduce the option to half. The job of the Facebook algorithm is to decide which ads should be in the forefront, and then calculate which users are highly relevant to the top ads, including the user's point of praise, comments, sharing, and what their friends have interacted with.

At the same time, in order not to affect the user's experience, Facebook will also be between advertisers and users, the preference of users. If users are interested in a particular topic or event and have a lot of comments, Facebook rarely sends the top-ranked ads to them because if the user is concerned about a particular topic or event, the information flow ad that appears in the dynamic will have a negative impact on his overall experience. And if a user spends most of his time browsing information aimlessly, without a particular hobby or choice, it is more likely to send him a top-ranked ad because the ad will not appear abrupt in the user's dynamic.

In combination, according to Facebook's algorithm, those with a lot of user reviews, points of praise, content about recent hot topics, a short amount of Zane comments, and shared content are likely to be singled out, ultimately in the form of the user's favorite (picture, video, or text). Appears in the user's buddy dynamic. On the contrary, it is difficult to get into the forefront of ads like the headline party.

In fact, the calculation of information flow advertising is a dynamic process, not only to consider what to send ads to users, but also decide when to send them. When a user logs on to Facebook, Facebook performs a ranking operation, deciding which ad to insert in the user's buddy dynamic at the moment. To this end, Facebook will also grasp when and where users interact with a certain content, roughly mastering the user's online active period.

To ensure the user experience, another social giant Twitter has also made a lot of effort to match the exact algorithm. Twitter's advertisers choose accurate delivery based on key words, user interests, gender, the same user attributes and devices. Only user interest, Twitter offers a total of 350 categories of options, such as education, food, beauty, books, and so on, each of the big categories and fine out a number of small options, such as the film under the subdivision action films, cartoons, comedies and so on, advertisers only need to tick the relevant labels, can be put to the relevant interest attributes of the target crowd.

Relevance: Balance the interests of advertisers and users

Social media often love and hate the information flow ads, on the one hand, information flow advertising is an important source of income for social media, is an important source of mobile advertising; On the other hand, it is worried that information flow advertising will affect the user experience, resulting in the loss of users. Therefore, some social media in the launch of the information flow ads, restrictions on the number of such ads, such as Facebook's first launch of the information flow ads, the day in the user's dynamic ads do not exceed 1.

But in the face of the huge benefits of information-flow advertising, social media is hard not to open up. In fact, by 2013, 5% of the daily dynamic information on Facebook is advertising. To eliminate the worry of social media, the most fundamental thing is to improve the relationship between information flow advertising and users, in order to help advertisers achieve their goals, but also to bring users a good user experience.

One way Facebook raises its relevance is through user research. Every once in a while, some users receive questions asking them about their Facebook friends ' dynamic experience. Facebook has made the user's feedback into a table showing what has been improved and what needs to be improved. Facebook also compares the different experiences of users from different groups, such as comparing the experience of people who have not received the flow of information for a long time, and those who often receive it, to determine the degree of relevance between the ad and the user.

In addition, when a user blocks ads appearing in the dynamic, Facebook asks them why they are shielded, whether they think the ad is "irrelevant", "not interested" or "disturbing the user," which will be an important basis for Facebook to decide what kind of ads to send to.

"When users tell us what kind of ads they want to see and don't want to see, when they interact with an ad (point, click, Comment or share), we know what is relevant to them." When a user blocks an ad, we know that it should be less for him, "said Fidji Simo, director of product management at Facebook's ad team.

In addition, an important way to improve relevance is to use the native advertisement, that is, as a social media user, in the form of user preference, inserted into the user's interest in a topic of conversation. This kind of way throws the user to be good, does not retired realizes with the user the interaction, may bring the unexpected effect.

A survey by AD video sites Shareghrough and Ipgmedia Lab also confirms that the advertising effect in the information flow is 25% higher than other ads because it looks more like the traditional content, can bring value to users, and is more likely to arouse their interest.

Can micro-trust reproduce myths?

Since its launch in 2011, micro-letters have created a huge social biosphere, with 1.1 billion registered users and 440 million active users, according to January 2015 data. But all along, in order not to affect the user experience, micro-letter advertising has been carefully, the effect is very little. But in the face of the huge market for mobile advertising, micro-credit was a big step in advertising in 2015.

Although there are examples of successful cases of information flow advertising such as Facebook, Twitter, and QQ space, it is still too early to judge whether micro-letters can replicate the brilliance of foreign social media information flow advertising, and there are still some problems to be solved.

For advertisers, micro-trust friends Circle of large data accumulation and excavation, at least need to wait a few years to really guide marketing. After two or three years, social marketing will be both content and technology, and during this period, The advertiser's social marketing is the first to detonate the topic rather than do precision orientation, their budgets in the content and resources of the investment must be more than technology.

The second is the user experience problem. After experiencing the freshness of the test period, it is crucial that the user can still accept the passive advertisement without affecting the user's experience and how to turn the advertisement into the valuable information of the user.