Neither, I say!

A post this morning over on Social Media Today talks about how Twitter has an inherent edge over Facebook as an advertising medium. It says that “people do not go to Facebook expecting to see ads.”

I disagree. People expect to see ads on Facebook; they just don’t plan to be clicking on them … and are you suggesting that people go to Twitter expecting to see ads? (Or, at least, more so than they expect to see ads on Facebook?)

It feels like Facebook and Twitter have been with us forever, but it hasn’t really been that long at all. Facebook launched in 2004 while Twitter launched in July 2006.

Still and all, there’s evidently a vast divide between social media experts, who preach interaction and conversation at every available soapbox, and marketers, who’ve never met a method of interrupting people they didn’t embrace.

When, oh when, will marketers as a whole wake up and realize that interruption sucks when it comes to social media?

Instead of thinking “How can we trick someone into seeing our ad?” or “How can we make it harder for someone to close the popup window that contains our ad?” (those light-gray buttons on clear backgrounds are really getting old, people), marketers need to be thinking, “How can we engage people?” and “How can we provide the tools and materials that make it easy for our most passionate customers to spread the word about us?”

Because as far as I can tell, we’re still in pretty much the same place we were about five or six years ago.

Haven’t marketers learned anything in that time?

Takeaway for marketers: Stop thinking print and television. Get with the program, already, willya?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Internet Stuff, Rants 'n' Such, Social Media.