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The rise of social media platform is nothing less than a fairy tale.
With Orkut and Facebook hitting the deck in the early 2000s and a ferocious emergence of different social networking sites in the last decade, the advertising approach has completely transformed.
It wasn’t late before advertisers put up an insurgency against the traditional advertising techniques.
So, if you are running a small or a medium sized business and haven’t exercised social media advertising yet, you are missing out big time.
Talking about the United States alone, more than 65% of people use social media platforms on a daily basis.
Do you know how much time these people spend on social media every day? An average of 2 hours and 15 minutes each day.
The most fantastic part is – if implemented correctly, your social media advertising can empower you to reach around 50000 people on a specific day. Yes, that can happen, only if you follow a profitable and viable approach.
Do you want to increase your brand’s popularity on social media sites?
Social media advertising is a proven way using which you can place targeted ads on these channels.
The most arousing factor in social media advertising is the presence of a colossal audience that is nothing but revenue making opportunities for business.
Now, the hard part is that you need to classify your target audience out of the large crowd present on social media. How would you do that?
Putting up ads on social media sites is a great way to reach your audience.
From big players to SMB owners, everyone is today pacing up their social media advertising efforts.
A glimpse of how big social media advertising can be seen by the stat that reveals an expenditure of $ 67.9 million USD for the year 2018. This means that companies are almost spending $23 on each user.
And this is going to increase at a rapid annual rate of 28.4%. Market experts have predicted that by the year 2022, total spending on social media advertising is going to touch $ 185 million USD.
A number of social media consulting and social media marketing companies have emerged in recent times promising businesses to offer a prolific result.
The emergence of social media agency is the direct consequence of an increase in demand for social media advertising.
And this is so because branding and advertising on social networking sites have been extremely beneficial for business of all sizes and sectors.
Here are some of the apparent benefits that you can avail with social media advertising:
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you can classify your market to direct your marketing efforts in a much lucrative manner?
Social networking sites generally encourage users to offer additional details so as to amplify the experience. In some cases, apart from generic information like name and email address, social media platforms also collect demographic details like age, location, gender, etc.
For instance, social networking sites keep a log of their users depending on what group or community they are joining. This offers these social channels to develop posts in accordance with their users’ interest.
In a nutshell, social media advertising empowers business owners and marketers to segment their prospects/customers on geographic, demographic, and psychological factors.
Want to know which social media platform will be the best fit for your paid campaigns?
Look for social networking sites where your organic tasks are performing best.
The platforms where your brand’s content is enticing most engagement should be an apparent choice for your paid advertising endeavors.
Paid advertising is all about targeting where your customers are most densely available, most accessible, and show most engagement.
Here are some popular and most engaging social networking sites that are best for your paid campaign efforts.
As of December 2018, Facebook has around 2.32 billion MAU (monthly active users).
This is what makes Facebook stand apart in terms of the availability of potential customers for businesses to target.
The most astonishing feat is that Facebook offers the customization facility so that you can tailor-make your advertising campaign with respect to your business objective.
There are a total of 11 campaigns goals that are spread under 3 parent segments, which comes handy and convenient when looking to narrow down that humungous set of people available on Facebook.
All in all, there are 3 sorts of parent categories under which Facebook looks to offer different types of campaigns. These are:
Awareness: As the name suggests, this kind of campaign is centered to raise brand awareness of your business.
Under this segment, there are three types of campaigns that you can deploy:
Consideration: This type of Facebook campaign offers you options to increase engagement with your audience.
There are five ways using which you can customize this campaign suiting your business requirement:
Conversion: This sort of Facebook campaign provides you the facility to increase the conversion rate for your business.
In addition to this, there are 8 types of Facebook ads that you can run for your business:
This image-based social networking site is one of the highest visited channels second to Facebook.
User engagement is more on Instagram than on Facebook, making it a perfect medium to advertise your product using organic content.
Since Instagram is held by Facebook, the advertisements here serve the same classifications of business goals i.e. awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Let’s go through the type of Instagram ads you can run:
Photo or Video: I assume every one of you has been on Instagram or know what’s it like, right?
Videos and Images are shared by different users on Instagram as these are only ways of putting up content on this social networking site.
A photo advertisement doesn’t look any different from the normally shared image except for one thing; a photo advertisement has ‘sponsored’ written on the top corner of the image.
If your business is looking for conversion or engagement, putting up a CTA (call-to-action) button the ad will increase the scope of the advertisements.
Since the visual appeal is the only way to target and bring in the audience on Instagram, you have to make sure that the images or videos that you are sharing are in adherence with your business objective and brand style.
When putting up videos, one should consider the fact that the videos are played on mute mode on Instagram, so if you are able to set up video without sound, it would be perfect for this image-sharing platform.
Carousel: Carousel is putting up a storyline or compelling message by utilizing various elements like photos or videos (maximum 10) to pinpoint the attributes and value your product or product line offers to consumers.
This type of social media advertising requires you to use a uniform theme for all images so that they seem visually symmetric and pleasing.
Story: This is another compelling way to elude users towards your brand. Instagram offers you the benefit to design and put up a story of photos or videos of 15 seconds max.
The highlight of these ads is that they are displayed in full-screen format between the users’ stories on your Instagram feed. Remember the length of these ads is 24 hours only, so an excellent tactic for immediate marketing.
When the business objective is to make the content viral or reach to a huge audience base within less span of time, Twitter is the best place to invest.
From the advertisement point of view, Twitter is a haven for marketers. This social media platform provides you the leverage to set up ads based on 6 business goals.
Don’t forget, there are millions of tweets sent every day so if you want your content to be visible, you require strategy and timing.
Let’s have a quick look at the variety of twitter campaign:
Awareness: If you wish that your brand’s tweet or your tweet should be visible to a larger audience, this kind of ad comes handy.
Different social media consultants or social media agency will charge you a particular amount per 1000 impressions.
Engagement: Business owners who are looking to increase user engagement on promoted tweets need to pay for each engagement. For instance, for every retweet, comment or like with unique user you need to pay up.
This is one of the fastest methods to elevate customer engagement with your brand.
Followers: This one is an easy peasy. With these ads, you can build up a strong Twitter audience for yourself or your business. The billing is done for each new follower.
Conversions: For running this kind of ad, you have to spend for each click.
Installment: Twitter charges you for each app installment by users.
Re-engagement: People have downloaded your app but aren’t using it! You run the re-engagement ad and make people use your app. Charges are for each app click.
Promoted video views: Twitter increases the views of your Video or GIF and charges you for each view.
Typically, two types of ads you can run on Twitter:
Promoted tweets: These are normal tweets. The only difference is that your tweets will be available to people who don’t follow you. You pay for that. These tweets have ‘sponsored’ written over them.
Promoted accounts: If you want to boost the visibility of your profile to a wider audience who you think might be intrigued in your content, you can have promoted account on Twitter.
The best part is that these accounts are shown in the timeline of prospects in the ‘Who to Follow’ suggestion and search results.
This one social networking platform is regarded as an extraordinarily prolific channel for networking and cementing business relationships.
If you wish to advertise on LinkedIn, you need to run ads depending on three business objectives; awareness, consideration, and conversion (all three same as discussed above).
LinkedIn offers you to make a strong brand presence by running these 6 kinds of advertisements:
Sponsored content: Looks like a generic post and will be available to desktop and mobile users. Typically used by the brands to put up content in front of a bigger prospect base.
Sponsored inmail: The only difference between LinkedIn’s sponsored inmail and normal email marketing is that the sponsored content reaches the inbox of users’ Twitter inbox. The sending and receiving of email are done only when the user is active.
Text ads: You might have noticed the small ads appearing on the top right of the desktop screen while on Twitter. These are text ads and can be set up with thumbnail images.
Video ads: When it comes to visual advertising, video ads are considered as the most impactful way to reach and entice the audience. LinkedIn offers video ads that you can run to create a distinguishable brand image of your business.
Display ads: You want ads that should be directed towards a particular set of audience? Run display advertisements on LinkedIn in a noise-free environment specifically targeting your desired set of prospects.
Dynamic ads: This one is a personalized message or advertisement that is sent to your audience based on its behavior so as to create a strong impact.
There are other social media channels like Snapchat, Pinterest, and YouTube, where you can run advertisements for your brand.
While Snapchat and Pinterest are typically about running visual advertisements including images, GIFs, and videos, YouTube offers a splendid opportunity to promote your brand through enticing videos.
Having said this, social media is a dazzling and splashy dais to not just increase the brand awareness and user engagement, but also to cement a strong place of your business for the long run.
We have tried to cover the top 4 popular social media channels and their respective advertisement options. If you want more clarification, reach us in the comment section. Thanks!
This is an awesome post. Really very informative and creative contents.
Great work Shashvat, You explain very well about Capsulization of Social Media Advertising. Social media is a great platform to promote your business. If you are new at social media and have fewer followers, This article will help you a lot to improve that thing.
I will incorporate it into my workflow. Great post.
Indeed all these channels are very important for marketing via social media