The most important component of any marketing campaign, social marketing included, is the research and planning that is done prior to starting. Your whole campaign relies on collecting the right information, putting it into the correct perspective, and formatting plans based on how you interpret that information.
One piece of information that is vital is to know and understand the market and reach of your proposed social marketing vehicle. Getting the right information can be difficult. Profy.com published a graph for Myspace showing the regional interest.
From a social marketing perspective, and probably advertising as well, is knowing the countries that have a high Myspace exposure. Just as interesting is to note the countries that don’t appear in the list.
Myspace has a high exposure in the major English speaking regions. The USA, Australia and the UK dominate with Puerto Rico and Malaysia also dominant. The countries missing include China, Japan, India and Germany. If you are targeting the US market then Myspace could be an ideal site to run a social marketing campaign. If you wish to target Europe, then perhaps a little more research on some of the other sites may show them to be more valuable.
There are some companies that try to avoid the Asian region as much as possible when it comes to online sales. If you are one of these companies then Myspace would be suitable. If you want to target this region, then perhaps Facebook may provide a better coverage.
These statistics are very simple and don’t reveal information such as demographics. Once you start to break the information down into age and gender, you may find the situation changes. Social marketing relies on this information prior to starting a campaign. This ensures your time and effort (and money) is being targeted in the right direction. Whilst there are no guarantees when it comes to marketing, you can at least narrow the focus and remove options that won’t produce results prior to starting. All it takes is a little research.
I guess geographical targeting available with all the advertising servers I am aware of solves this problem completely – they will only serve your ads to users from the regions you want to target. And if you are talking about a viral marketing campaign, it is not enough to know where exactly the network is popular, you will need to understand which users you will actually reach with your available network – and that’s quite a different thing.