With the advent of social media, billions of individuals from the around the world are now able to communicate faster, more efficiently, and easier than ever before. Understanding how social media behavior directly affects marketing is a way for you to learn more about what advertising companies truly know about you and your everyday life and how that translates into the type of ads you see. Here are some ways you what you do online affect advertising.
Searches
Whenever you search a specific keyword or phrase using social networks and today’s top search engines, the data is recorded and placed into a file designed with you in mind. The more you search for particular subjects or topics, the more likely you are to see relevant ads that remind you of past searches you’ve conducted and offer up advertising solutions to those searches.
Websites you visit
Social media platforms such as Facebook have become known to track their users at all times, even when they are not actively using the social network itself. Whenever you visit another website (even if you are not currently on the social network of your choice), platforms are able to gather the data and put the information to use with ad campaigns.
If you want to maximize your privacy while you are browsing online, consider investing in a VPN, or “Virtual Private Network”. A VPN keeps your internet browsing history entirely private and out of the hands of corporations and advertisers who are looking to collect as much data as possible from all users who are currently online. A VPN is ideal if you prefer non-targeted ads and want to increase the amount of privacy you have on the internet altogether.
Voice technology
Allowing applications and programs access to your video camera and microphone provide the companies themselves with permission to pick up on specific keywords and phrases that work well with ad campaigns and marketing strategies they are interested in executing. Unless you have all of your microphone access controls turned off, it is possible that multiple applications on your traditional smartphone are capable of hearing you speak on different subjects throughout the day.
Having a complete understanding of how social media works in conjunction with advertising and marketing is essential if you want to only provide companies with information of your choice. When you know how marketing and social media work together, never feel duped by personalized ads you are presented with while scrolling your social feeds again.
