During 2008 and the first eight months of 2009, Lotame examined over 100 rich-media campaigns it ran and found that social media advertising does not perform nearly as well as ads running on non-social sites. Their study showed lower click through rates on sites like Bebo and Flixster.
They compared their data with the industry standard measurements published by Google’s DoubleClick and found that the click-through rates for ads on social sites were lower than the average across all ad sizes, formats and types of advertiser.
Although they found that users on social sites are less likely to click an ad to leave the site, they also found that these same users were likely to interact with ads that kept them on the social site, such as including playing videos or expanding an ad message on-screen.