Can Advertisers Turn to Social Network Sites to Prevent Click Fraud?

Monday, October 29th, 2007

The rise of the social network in recent years has been an Internet phenomenon, and a large number of web marketers are trying to tap into these fertile markets where a well presented idea can go “viral” very quickly.

Over a series of posts I will discuss the rise of PPC programmes within social networking sites, and ask the question, is this type of advertising a solution to click fraud?

Social networks can be defined as a software solution which facilitates interaction between groups of like minded people. The most widely used social networking sites at the time of writing are MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and StumbleUpon. Groups of individuals will connect with each other and share discussions, media such as photographs,audio and video.

The communities approach very quickly build demographic groups which marketers are very keen to tap into. Some are creating viral content which is spread by community members. An example of this are Facebook applications. A very successful one was a Zombie program which allows friends to bite each other which turns a person into a Zombie in true horror movie fashion. Behind this extremely successful marketing campaign were the producers of a new Zombie film, who were able to spread the message of the film’s release to a large number of engaged users.

Moving forward from this, the social network companies are looking to tap into their own users via pay per click functionality. I intend to discuss the offerings of both StumbleUpon and Facebook over two future articles. The thing which differentiates these two PPC models is that they appear to be inherently less susceptible than the models in use by the major search engines.

In the next article I will focus on the PPC model adopted by StumbleUpon.

Tags: social networks
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