Power of Earned Advertising on Social Network Services: A Case Study of Friend Tagging on Facebook

Abstract

Social network services (SNSs) are now the primary advertisingmedium in terms of both reach and engagement.For both businesses and the SNS providers, it iscrucial to find advertising methods that users perceiveto be valuable. In this paper, we provide an empiricalevidence for the role of different advertising methodson SNSs (i.e. earned vs. paid) on the subjective evaluationof the relative worth of advertising. In particular,we concentrate on the act of ‘friend tagging’ – the conventionof tagging friends in a thread to a brand post –where users inadvertently engage in targeted and personalizedbrand advertising. Through survey analysis,we validate that users find earned advertising less irritatingand more informative, entertaining, and crediblethan paid advertising. We further ask if brands canstrategically craft their content to boost up friend tagging.Using the data collected from Facebook, we analyzewhat drives users to engage in friend tagging andfind that content characteristics such as media attachmentsand posting times affect friend tagging frequency.We conclude that friend tagging is a powerful userinitiatedsolution for matching products with potentialtarget audience.