ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the social media advertising environment, primarily the growing importance of advertising; the different advertising specifications of the different platforms; and challenges to success, such as ad-blocking programs. Welcome to one of the fastest-growing and fastest-evolving areas of strategic writing: advertising in social media. The purpose of social media advertising is to build financially beneficial relationships with individual consumers, often by persuading them to follow an organization's social media posts and to click or tap to specific landing pages within an organization's website. In 2016, Social Media Examiner surveyed 5,000-plus marketing professionals in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia and gathered the advertising data. Social media advertisers should familiarize themselves with the advertising-guidance sections of each social media platform. A threat too many forms of digital advertising is the growth of ad-blocking programs, which can prevent the appearance of ads in individual users' views of websites and social media platforms.
