Social media has changed human behavior. We look to social media for updates on our friends and family, what we should cook for dinner, what we should wear, and what’s new in the world. It only makes sense that companies should also use social media to advertise.
Setting up a social media presence is a first step, but at some point, you’re going to want to go beyond putting up photos of the office cat and start getting serious. That means paid advertising. Read on to learn more about why paid advertising on social media is a good idea for your company.
One of the biggest reasons to use social media advertising is that that’s where your customers are. In the U.S., 69 percent of adults use Facebook, 37 percent use Instagram, 27 percent use LinkedIn, 24 percent use Snapchat, and 22 percent use Twitter. There are few other sites that have such a wide reach available.
But social media also offers a unique opportunity to reach your potential customers when they’re already in an impressionable mood. People go on social media to see what’s new and hot among their friends and idols. When your product shows up in that context, customers may be more willing to spend their money on it since they see it as the latest and greatest.</p>
There are two ways to do social media marketing: organic reach and paid reach.
Organic reach comes from content you put on your page without any additional promotion. Organic reach can grow if people share your post on their pages or comment on the post. In general, organic reach tends to be limited to a percentage of your follower list.
But paid reach comes from advertisements that are promoted beyond your group of followers. The social media platform uses a set of target demographics you create to place your ad on potential customers’ feeds. You can set a budget for your ad that determines how many people the ad will be promoted to.</p>
Facebook is a must for paid advertising, and it’s easy to see why. Facebook has the largest social media following of any platform, and their advertising system is affordable and easy to use. You can spend $2, $200, or $2,000 or an ad, depending on your personal budget, and their target demographic system is very sophisticated. Paired with Targetable’s simplified interface, Facebook’s ad platform is not only powerful, but it’s simple to use, too.
The Targetable/Facebook pairing can also blend organic and paid content. If you have a post that’s doing especially well among your followers, you can choose to boost that post, spreading it to a whole new audience of potential customers. You also have the option to create ads from scratch that won’t show up on your page.
Moving on to Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn, we start to lose the universal appeal that Facebook holds. Yet each has its own special capabilities. So it’s important to know your demographics to know whether you should do paid advertising on Instagram. By and large, more women use Instagram than men, and more than half of adults under the age of 30 use the platform, so if your target customers are young women, Instagram advertising can pay off. Targetable clients who advertise restaurants, specialty food stores, boutiques and other small businesses have found that Instragram draws a very attractive crowds.
Because Instagram is owned by Facebook, the two platforms integrate easily through the Targetable app. If you’re already advertising through Facebook, you can link that same ad campaign to Instagram. You can also set up Instagram-only ads through the Facebook platform, selecting the placement you want for your campaign. During this process, you can also decide if you want your ad to appear in feeds or on Instagram stories.
Twitter is one of the fastest-growing platforms for paid advertising. Their ads are subtle, blending into the rest of a user’s feed, with the only signal that this is an ad being a small “Promoted by ___” at the bottom of the post. The Twitter audience is mostly comprised of men under the age of 30.
With Twitter advertisements, you have three options for the type of ad you want to run: promoting your account, promoting a trending hashtag, or promoting a specific tweet. This allows you to reach your audience in the way that works best with your content. And like with Facebook and Instagram advertising, you can set your budget for Twitter ads.
Snapchat is overwhelmingly a young person’s game, but it’s a hugely important platform to those generations. According to one source, 39 percent of U.S. teenagers ranked it as their most important social media platform. 90 percent of Snapchat users are under the age of 24, and most of them are women.
Like Twitter, Snapchat offers a few different options for paid advertising. You can create Snap ads that show up on Snapchat stories, geo-filters, and sponsored lenses. These last two options allow users to engage with your brand in fun ways that can boost their interest in your product.
If your customers are more the driven business professional type than the selfie-snapping teen type, LinkedIn advertising can be a great option. The site is home to more than half a billion professionals, and having your company advertised on the platform can lend a sense of professional clout. Most LinkedIn users are men, and more than 70 percent of them live outside the U.S.
You can set your business up as a showcase page on LinkedIn to show off specific products or services you offer. You can also create dynamic advertisements that specifically target your potential customers. If you prefer, you also have the option of creating sponsored content that shows up in users’ feeds.
Using paid advertising on social media is a smart move for your business. Most U.S. adults are involved on some sort of social media, and the target advertising capabilities are hard to beat. We’re in a new age of advertising, and social media is the key to success.
If you’d like to get help managing your social media ads, reach out to us at Targetable. We take your content and photos and design professional ad campaigns and search for new advertising opportunities for your company. Schedule a demo below and learn how we can help take your advertising to the next level today.
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