I find eyetracking studies fascinating; the boost you can get in your conversion rate simply by moving things around is amazing. This new report by Pivot is important because it demonstrates the impact social media is having on advertising, and can help you think out of the box when it comes to promoting your brand on a social network. Brian’s analysis is pretty in-depth, and worth a read if you’re considering using Twitter, Facebook or another social advertising platform. ~ Melanie
The Pivot team set out to learn more about the state of social advertising and its opportunities by conducting an industry survey of 230 brand managers, executives, and marketing professionals. To download the full Pivot report, please click here. You can pick up Jakob Neilsen’s newest book on website usability here.
Is Social Advertising the Cure for Banner Blindness?
Digital advertising, such as banners and keyword buys, has long provided businesses with products to generate opportunities for clickthroughs, but these products are proving ineffective in social networks. In a phenomenon dubbed “banner blindness,” consumers are learning to ignore many forms of digital advertising in favor of the desired content within their area of focus. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen demonstrated through heat maps where our eyes are focused on a website screen. As you can see, consumer attention zeroes in on text and not the banners around it.
On the social web, banner blindness is even more prevalent. In social networks, content populates the social streams of consumer profiles. If we apply the heat map model to social streams, we can visualize how attention may mirror the behavior in traditional web sites. Advertising blindness is a real threat within social networks, but at the same time, represents a new opportunity to rethink paid media. Therefore, social networks are creating products and services to offer brands the ability to earn the attention of the consumers they hope to reach.
Read the entire post and see the rest of the cool pics, charts and graphs at Brian Solis.