How effective is social media advertising? A study of Facebook Social Advertisements

Social media advertising is becoming big business. On Facebook there are potentially as many as one billion pairs of eyes to see an advert. In the UK, on Facebook, there are around twenty seven million accounts a company's advert can reach [1]. With those kinds of figures it's easy to be drawn in by the hype and to spend money on advertising, but this leaves the central question; is social media advertising effective for small businesses? In attempt to answer this question we have launched an advert on Facebook for a case study business and monitored the traffic on the related website. We have also made observations of users interacting with Facebook advertisements. Results indicate that social media advertising can be effective for a small business even if the click-through rate is small. However it is also suggested that low click through rates from social media web sites are in part a result of poor usability on those sites which should be improved in order to deliver better results for businesses.