Written by Chris Jacob, Contributor for ExactTarget:

Digital advertising has grown in waves with display, email, affiliate and search engine marketing being the major channels in the first wave. Then as the web, consumer behavior, and technology evolved, these channels were joined in a second wave by video, mobile, content, and social media marketing.

In a channel like paid search, even though Google dominates in most markets, the value proposition and method to market itself differs little to the other search engines like Bing, Baidu, and Yandex. Social media marketing has historically comprised of marketing on platform channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr where most or all of the content has been user generated.

So unlike search engines where the form, function, and advertising opportunity is largely the same, the various social channels differ tremendously in their use cases, content, engagement, and advertising opportunities. Thus their value to a business and the overall marketing and sales funnel differs greatly both at the platform and vertical level.

While Facebook is clearly the largest player in town, a lot of agencies and advertisers would traditionally start from the concept of a social media budget and then allocate accordingly across the channels they chose to invest in usually with the largest portion going to Facebook. In this structure, the team and team leader would then be answerable for the performance of social media.

Facebook has reached a stage now in terms of its reach and engagement and the ever-increasing budgets devoted to it that it deserves its own unique category as much as TV, email, or search does today. This is because Facebook dominates:

All of the above dominance and variety doesn’t even include Facebook’s leadership or growing share in photo sharing, communications, shopping, search, and gaming.

So while some agencies and advertisers may not quite be ready to treat every social media platform as its own budget category, it is clear the unique value proposition Facebook brings for a marketer to reach their audience at enormous scale. Therefore combining Facebook with other social media platforms in allocating budget would seem as illogical as treating your TV and email budget as one.

——-

What is Social.com?
A true self-service platform, that’s powerful but easy-to-use and helps run efficient and effective social ad campaigns at scale. It powers the largest agencies and advertisers globally including the biggest social media advertisers in gaming, retail, CPG and entertainment. Social.com is part of the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.

Why use it?
Agencies and advertisers can build highly targeted campaigns quickly and easily, with sophisticated tools to optimize and automate every dollar invested. Teams can share and collaborate around campaign assets, to allow scalability across social media ad buying and strategy.