A few weeks ago at Snap’s Partner Summit, CEO Evan Spiegel announced that, in the U.S., Snapchat reaches 90% of 13 to 24-year-olds. While one company capturing 90% of any demographic is impressive, taking a step back at the bigger picture shows that nearly that same percentage of all internet users have at least one social network profile on any platform. Moreover, in the past seven years time spent on social networks has been steadily increasing to about 2 hours and 22 minutes a day, with many checking in at least daily.

Suffice to say, whether you like it or not, everyone is on social media.

And with such a large percentage of younger demographics having already been exposed to social media, users now and into the future are not just digital natives, but social media natives.

Although an era of social media savvy users is an obvious boon for social media platforms themselves, any advertiser can use the same techniques from inside those platforms to better connect with the same social media native users outside of them.

Ad Layout

Users only spend seconds digesting an ad, and that’s if their eyes even make it over there. That means advertisers have very little time to get their message across. Luckily, endless social feeds have inadvertently trained users where to look for key details when scanning user-generated content. Don’t take my word for it though — pick your favorite social network and see if these rules apply:

• Author name and/or avatar near a left corner (often the top)
• Main content somewhere in the middle (or even full bleed)
• Other metadata (e.g. social signals) and actions toward the bottom (often a corner)

So if our social media native audience is already primed to look for certain information in specific places, don’t make them think and put it where they expect it in your own ad. Have a call to action? Put it toward the bottom of the ad. Want to include your brand’s logo? Try dropping it in the top left corner of your unit. The less a user has to work, the quicker they’ll be able to get to the real message the advertiser is trying to get across.

Social Signals

Pop quiz: You’re taking a trip to a foreign country to which you’ve never been and you found a potential hotel for your stay. After scouring the internet, you find two web pages describing the hotel: one is the official hotel website and the other is a page for the hotel on a crowd-sourced review site. Which description of the property do you trust more?

If you said the review site, you’re not alone. The majority of users trust other consumers more than brands themselves when looking for product information. And while friends and family are typically most highly regarded, endorsements from complete strangers cannot be underestimated either.

Working-in user testimonials into campaigns isn’t a new idea, but social networks have given us more ways to show-off brands’ popularity to consumers. Many platforms allow supporters to leave comments (both positive and negative), and that pool of content can be used to provide social validation. Even surfacing less direct forms of endorsement like number of followers or user-generated ratings can give users just enough of a nudge to learn more about a brand.

Authenticity

There are so many brands on all the social networks that are all fighting for users’ attention that it begs the question of how users choose what brands to support. Turns out 90% of consumers think authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like.

With social networks providing brands an unfiltered connection to consumers, the content shared there is a large part of shaping a brand’s image. As such, many brand’s social media content already focuses on building long-term relationships with users.

If brands are already making an effort to be authentic on social media then that same content can be used to make your brand more authentic on the open web as well. Instead of always asking for something from users, advertisers can give them similar, if not the same, social content in their ad space. And if brands work with influencers to boost their image on social media, they can try working with those same partners outside of social media as well.

Social media is evolving rapidly, and the things that work today may not work a year from now, let alone tomorrow. But, by understanding how and why users interact with social media, marketers can better communicate their message to those same users outside of the walled gardens.