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Social Networking Is Worth $30 Million Per Day

Yes, you read that correctly. So don’t you want a piece of that pie?

Researchers in Penn state University have carried out some great examining of social media outlets across the web. They have found that updates on social media mediums such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other real-time user generated content sites could be worth more than $30 million per day (that’s $10.9 billion per year!) to advertisers.

“Real Time Content” is the terminology that these researchers use to describe the social media messages that we take for granted every day – tweets, status updates, comments etc. It also includes link-sharing activity. A real-time search engine can produce a stream of this content based on keywords entered by users. Jim Jansen is an associate professor in IT at Penn. He says “Real-time content is a window in to a person’s world at a particular moment in time. What we wanted to determine is if real-time search could be monetized.”

In the research, 6 months of real-time search engine queries were examined. After identifying unique search terms, they used Google Adwords to estimate traffic, which will estimate how valuable an ad might be. Approximately 52% of the unique searches had strong economic value. The key part is that if these searches were presented on a Google search results page, the estimation is that people would click on the resulting ads generated by the search more than 6.4 million times per day. This proves that advertising platforms based on real time search in social media could be very fruitful.

So what does this mean for us? While real-time search advertising has a long way to go, companies should be thinking outside the box when it comes to their paid advertising. Businesses are finding more and more conversion from using social media like LinkedIn advertising and Facebook advertising, as these platforms offer very targeted pay per click advertising programs. Advertising through social media is a prudent move by any organisaiton.

Not sure where to start? Contact SiliconCloud today for advice on social media advertising, or download our webinar on Building A Social Media Strategy.