American Social Media Networks targets SMB Dollars

Posted by admin at June 11, 2014

There is a trend that i noticed in Social Media networks especially western social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and just recently, Pinterest. They seem to moving away from huge companies as advertisers and focusing more on small and medium enterprises. Facebook has been a major player in the advert selling market that it once announced that up to 85% of its income is from promoted material. On the dawn of Twitter’s IPO, the social network started selling promoted posts as a way of monetizing. Also recently Twitter’s Jack Dorsey even started a new service providing soft loans to SMEs. And now, Pinterest has joined the SMB band wagon selling ads in the form of pins. The business pays Pinterest when a promoted pin is clicked and the company also plans to roll-out an analytics application to enable businesses monitor the performance of pins.

Doesn’t all this sound familiar? I mean, isn’t that what the Google Adsense is all about? There must be another way to monetize a social network. I once did a piece on how the Asian tech companies are monetizing their chat apps: selling small products such as games, stamps and other in-app purchases. While this make money a different way, the western markets, from my understand, are trying to keep the product free, by transferring cost away from the general end-user and on to a special kind of end-user: the business owners.

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