New reports show that organic reach for company pages on Facebook is as low as 5-11% (Locowise). That means that if 50 people chose to follow your company page on Facebook, chances are only 3-6 of them are actually seeing your posts in their newsfeeds! While we agree that this seems totally unfair, it is Facebook’s world and we’re all just living in it. That is where social media paid advertising comes into play. If we want to remain competitive on the social media giant and other social platforms, we need to throw a few marketing dollars their way. In this blog we will cover the top social platforms for paid advertising and offer a few tips for tackling your new strategy.
If you aren’t completely sold on why advertising is a great option for most brands, here are five reasons to help convince you:
- With paid ads you can get a broader reach (AKA more than 5-11% of your followers).
- You have the ability to reach those who do not already follow you.
- Ad targeting options allow you to target a very specific audience.
- You will see immediate results for your efforts.
- Ads make it possible for you to promote a particular event or service.
Top Social Media Ad Platforms
If you are just getting started with social media advertising, we often recommend that you give Facebook a try. According to SocialBakers, 75% of brands promote their Facebook posts. There are a ton of different advertising options to choose from making it a great platform for any brand.
Common Facebook Ad Types:
- Boost Your Post: Pay for your Facebook post to show up in more newsfeeds
- Promote Your Page: Your Facebook page will be recommended to specific audiences
- Clicks to Website: Drive people to your company website from Facebook
- Website Conversions: Track actual conversions on your company website such as filling out a contact form
- Local Awareness: Push your ads to people who are within a certain distance of your storefront
- Promote Your Event: Get your Facebook event in front of more eyes
- Promote an Offer: Show a special offer or discount to more people on Facebook
- Increase Video Views: Pay for your video to show in more newsfeeds
Facebook’s ad targeting allows you to define your audience by age, gender, interests, behaviors, connections, and so much more. In addition, you can specify whether you want your ad to run continuously or in a specified date range, as well as how much you want to spend (Facebook requires a daily minimum of $5.00). With Facebook ads the possibilities are endless!
When a brand’s Twitter followers see the brand’s promoted tweets, they buy 29% more than other followers who simply see organic tweets (VentureBeat). This statistic reveals the success of Twitter ads. If your company is currently using Twitter organically, we recommend adding paid advertising to your strategy.
Common Twitter Ad Types:
- Increase Followers: Pay to feature your account in users’ timelines with a “Follow” button
- Website Clicks: Push people to your company website
- Tweet Engagements: Promote a tweet to encourage favorites, retweets, and mentions
- Leads on Twitter: Gather user information such as names and email addresses
Like Facebook, Twitter also offers a lot of neat targeting options including refining your reach by location, gender, languages, devices, keywords, followers, interests, and more. The daily minimum for Twitter is much lower at $.01 daily although you would be hard pressed to find a bid that low.
LinkedIn advertising is going to work best for business-to-business (B2B) companies. Their options are a little more limited but that is what makes LinkedIn advertising so straightforward. According to LinkedIn, ads with images get up to 20% more clicks. So don’t forget to include images in all of your ads! LinkedIn also recommends making your ad headlines into questions for a better click-through-rate.
Common LinkedIn Campaign Types:
- Create an Ad: Develop a small advertisement with an image, content, and link to drive traffic to your company website
- Sponsor Content: Pay to show your LinkedIn updates in more newsfeeds
5 Social Media Advertising Best Practices
- Always research the keywords you plan to use in your ads to see how they perform on various platforms. Hashtags.org is a great site for researching the prominence of a specific hashtag.
- Create a landing page for each ad so you can drive your specific audience to a specialized page on your website where you will be more likely to convert them.
- Include a high-quality image in every ad in order to grab the viewer’s attention and encourage action.
- Use the free analytics provided by each social platform to track the success of your ads and make changes as needed.
- Experiment! We recommend that when you are just getting started with paid advertising, you try out a few different options to see where your marketing dollars are best spent.
Overall, there are so many different options when it comes to paid advertising on social media and this blog just barely scratches the surface! If you need assistance with setting up or managing ads on your social platforms, please call Informatics.
