A great way to save money on paying for advertisements such as, flyers, billboards, etc., is using social media. Between Facebook and Twitter, it has become very easy to spread the word through advertising. With using social media for advertising, you are able to connect with all of your friends and more. On Twitter, there is a greater chance of an advertisement being spread by “retweeting” a post. Most of my Twitter feed consists of information that others have shared, while a slim portion is original content that I now have the pleasure of sharing. These two aspects easily go hand-in-hand with each other.When it comes to my favorite TV shows or artist’s, I am always up to date with their latest advertisements because I follow them on social media. Now a days, it’s rare to watch a show on TV without seeing their Twitter handle and the featured hashtag of the night in one of the corners of the screen.
One of the most persuasive and successful social media advertisements that I think takes place today is the hit game Candy Crush, featured on Facebook as well an app for your cell phone. Since Facebook sponsors Candy Crush, the advertisements are always on the side of the screen or in your news feed. Once you get hooked on the game, the advertisements make you believe that you have to spend money in order to keep playing the game and buy more lives, instead of waiting 20 minutes for a life to restore itself. With Facebook saturating our news feed, we begin to think that the game has become a normal routine in our life and that it has to stay in our life. The advertisements make us believe that we have to play the game in order to have fun. It is up to us as a society to strengthen our advertisement media literacy, and be able to make the choice whether or not to fold to the advertisement or scroll past it.