• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 20, 2013

To keep up with growing demand from Madison Avenue, the social marketing consultants at Likeable Media debuted a media and planning department on Monday.

Dubbed LikeableAds.com, the unit will specialize in crafting, placing, optimizing, and analyzing social ads for clients, said Carrie Kerpen, CEO of Likeable Media.

"I expect [the new department] to be a huge component of our business in 2013," Kerpen predicted.

She also named Tim Bosch, former strategy director at Likeable, as director of the media and planning business. In this new role, Bosch will be expected to achieve efficiencies and develop new revenue streams for clients.
 
"Social ads were designed to be dynamic,” Bosch said. “I plan to rid the industry of static ad units."

Likeable is not exactly new to the business of optimizing social media campaigns. Citing internal estimates, the firm claims an average cost per like for Facebook ads that is 41% better than the industry average.

Founded as theKbuzz in 2007, Likeable's clients include General Electric, Neutrogena, Verizon, Logitech and Medtronic. The company reported revenue of $4.7 million in 2011 and $5.2 million in 2012.
 
Long a playground for marketing experimentation, social media is now critical to many a brand strategy. Highlighting this point, Facebook recently surpassed Google as the top driver of traffic to portals like Yahoo and MSN, according to Compete.

Likewise, more marketers are embracing the fact that effective social strategies require a paid media component. "The competition and the clutter in the space is real," Matt Wurst, Director of Digital Communities at 360i, told attendees of the OMMA Social conference

Paid or otherwise, “we really do need to scrutinize the quality of [social] content that’s out there,” Gian LaVecchia, managing partner and U.S. Digital Lead at MEC, said at OMMA Social. LaVecchia said he had a few offending brands in mind, but refrained from naming names.