Effectiveness of Advertising on Social Network Sites: A Case Study on Facebook

Abstract

Social network sites like Facebook, MySpace and StudiVZ have recently gained enormous popularity for marketing communications. Facebook especially describes itself as the perfect marketing tool because its developers have created an advertising system which allows businesses to use the information of each Facebook user for targeted advertising. Despite the current boom of Facebook for marketing, this study reveals that users’ purchase decisions are not influenced by advertisements and users do not actively use Facebook as an information source. However, Facebook provides the ideal platform for direct communication between organisations and customers. Marketing on social network sites has to follow new rules and principles and each organisation has to clearly determine if social media marketing is appropriate for them or not.