If you try to simplify pay per click advertising to just a sentence, you can sum it up as a way to gain traffic online. If you tried to simply social media advertising to just one sentence too, it would be exactly the same. The truth is that PPC shares alot of similarities with other forms of advertising such as the use of gaining traffic from social media. For this reason, below are the main similarities between pay per click advertising and social media programs: inparticularly, Twitter and Facebook.

Both Use Text Adverts

To gain traffic to the advertiser’s desired landing page, the advertiser will need to create a text advert to advertise their landing page’s contents. With PPC, this has three stages:

• A title which has an aim to grab the web user’s attention.
• The description which gives a little more information to the web user about the title.
• The URL where the URL of the landing page is displayed (although it can be changed).

With Twitter, advertisers have to create tweets in 140 characters or less. This can be deemed much harder to do. Usually, advertisers start the tweet off with the ‘title’ (a sentence to grab the Twitter users’ attention) and then has the link straight after it with description following that. What makes Twitter inparticularly good is the fact that anyone who uses Twitter and retweets the advertised tweet is making it more publicised. I guess with PPC, you have to rely on social media buttons on a landing page for this to happen.

Both Direct Traffic To A Landing Page

This can be seen to be a similarity for all types of advertising programs online because, in essence  advertising programs’ objectives are to gain traffic to a specific web page. The main difference with advertising programs is how they gain traffic to the landing page. For PPC, PPC programs such as AdWords uses Google search engine and Adsense publisher websites to display adverts to be clicked on. Whereas, Twitter uses the idea of social media, trends, the ability to make something viral and a click on a tweet to gain traffic to a web page.

Both Are Contextual

This is a vague but a true statement. Of course, we all know that PPC is completely contextual through relating keywords used in the content of websites and search engines to the adverts being displayed. For Twitter, there is no true contextuality. However, we can group Twitter users by there interests which are sometimes made apparent through their tweets, the hash tags they use and the retweets they tweet. For example, an advertiser could tweet a tweet about an advertising campaign to do with cars. He can use certain hash tags such as #cars (I know it’s unimaginative!) to contextually select the Twitter users who will predominantly see the advertised tweet.