Marketing to Teens Online

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Remember that since most teens use social networks to hang out virtually with the same friends they see at school all day, it doesn't matter if they lie because their friends are all in on the conceit. It's just something teens do for the reasons stated above.

With all this lying going on, there will be a lot of behavioral targeting of ads that completely misses the mark, with hordes of teenage "100-year-olds" getting pitches for cholesterol drugs and incontinence products.

Teens Want More Control

While teens may mess with advertisers as a way to fight back against the onslaught of marketing they are exposed to, they are not averse to all marketing. This is especially true if they love a product, the marketing offers some extra value, or it's simply funny and creative. As they're used to controlling their online experience, they strongly dislike pop-up ads or spam in the form of instant messages and text messages—particularly when the communications are out of context.

When Facebook first launched its newsfeed feature, allowing your entire network to see your every action, its users were outraged. Facebook remedied the situation by allowing users to control exactly who gets to see the newsfeed, photos, or other aspects of your profile.

Notably, in addition to its new targeted marketing effort, Facebook also announced on Nov. 6 that it plans to let advertisers create their own profile pages so that users can identify themselves as fans of a product. MySpace has been doing this for a while now , and the response has been strong. Droves of teens have "friended" the MySpace page set up by Wendy's (WEN) for a square hamburger named "Smart." Similarly, Condé Nast's teen site Flip.com asks its users which ads they want to be displayed on their profiles when they register.

Approaches like these offer multiple benefits: They make teens understand that advertising pays for a Web site, get them to think about the products being offered, and let them consciously choose to align themselves with a specific brand. By giving younger users more control and choice over what ads they'll see, they may have more respect for the service and for the advertisers. This in turn may lead to word-of-mouth recommendations, a major force behind teen purchasing decisions.

The lesson here is that the real way to reach younger users on social networking sites is to be transparent about the need for advertising to support a free service. Then allow them to actively participate in determining what kinds of advertising they receive through a series of questions. Reward them for filling out the whole survey with a cool prize.

Instead of scraping their profiles and hoping your ads hit the right target, are noticed, and then actually clicked on, why not engage users to find out what kinds of ads would appeal to them? By allowing them to deliberately opt in and share information with you, they can maintain a comforting sense of control, and you can serve ads that will hit their target.

Goodstein is the publisher of Ypulse.com, a Web site specializing in marketing to young people, and is the author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online. She covers teens and technology in an occasional column at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/.