If you’ve been promoting your business Facebook page and Twitter account you’re not alone. Companies increasingly are running online ads that focus less on pitching their products and more on highlighting their social accounts, writes Andrew Adam Newman for the New York Times.

“The ads, which have menu tabs and increasingly resemble mini-Web sites themselves, allow users to click within the ad to see a brand’s Twitter messages or Facebook wall posts in real time, or to watch a brand’s video content from YouTube — all without leaving the Web page where the ad appears,” he writes.

As an example he held up a recent online ad for cleaning brand Mrs. Meyers which consumers interacted with for an average of 30 seconds, compared with an 11-second average for other ads. Not only did they spend more time on the social media-focused ad, 35 of every 1,000 users clicked through to the Mrs. Meyers web site, compared with an average of just one in 1,000.

Read more at The New York Times ^[1].