Businesses are finding that social advertising can be a huge benefit when it comes to reaching a targeted audience with their brand and finding that followers can turn into customers.
Your business is already advertising your brand if you use any of the platforms, but this can only take you so far. The revenue for social advertising is estimated to reach $8.4 billion this year, surpassing that of newspaper advertising. More and more businesses are using their advertising budget on social media ads.
Social advertising can be ideal for certain types of businesses – retailers, t-shirt companies – it’s essential and very affordable. Facebook, for example, is a great place for these types of business to not only grow their brand name, but they can also sell their products to their customers and other users of the site.
However, for those types of businesses that don’t have a tangible product – some technology businesses, for example – social ads can still be a great and affordable way of exposing your brand to a greater number of people, but you may not get the leads that you were hoping counting on. It’s still a recommended practice to engage in.
How can you use social advertising to promote your business?
Social advertising is booming
As mentioned, the revenue for social advertising is enormous, with more and more users viewing coupons, sales, offers and other things while online. This is true regardless of the social media platform, as well as the device a user was on; mobile advertising accounted for 60% of digital media time in the US alone. Data also suggests -
- Click through rates for desktop users of Facebook are 8.1 times higher than normal web ads
- Mobile ads have a 9.1 higher click through rate
- Promoted tweets on Twitter have a 1-3% engagement rate
- By 2018, over half of global mobile users will have smartphones
Ways to Advertise
There are a few different platforms that your business can use for social advertising; in fact, you may wonder which one is better for your business. This all depends on where your target audience is and what platforms you’re currently using. There are two types of payment systems –
- CPC (cost per click)
- CPM (cost per thousand impressions)
Both of these are based on users seeing your ad and then clicking on that ad, which either directs them to your website, a sales events, coupon, etc.
In most cases, you create an ad, set up a time you want the ad to run, and then set up a budget for how much you want to spend on that campaign. Payment is only collected for the ads that are being clicked on.
Then there is something called sponsored content or native advertising, which in essence is content that is advertised on a media outlet that looks like it’s supposed to be there. This helps to expose the content to a bigger audience, drive awareness and traffic to a particular website or blog, directs customers to a conversation and leads between consumer and business.
Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter all have sponsored content options that allows businesses to showcase articles or blogs to reside at the top of a newsfeed – the main area most users are presented with when on their social media network – so it’s one of the first things they see after they log in.
These posts, like ads, can be targeted to an audience of your choosing. Depending on the network you’re using, you can target your audience’s location, industry, job level, age, gender, etc. LinkedIn’s sponsored updates, for example, allows you to target your audience’s skills or school; this is great if you’re trying to target certain colleges or audiences with certain skill sets. Twitter’s promoted tweets allow you to target audiences who are following certain people.
Facebook has a variety of different types of sponsored stories, which then show up in feeds when a user takes an action, such as liking your page or a particular post.
So how do you go about making sponsored content? Let’s say your business will have a booth at a local music festival and you want to tweet about it on Twitter. First, you would create a tweet to announce the festival, something along the lines of “We’re all fans of Ducky Charles and can’t wait to see him at #jazzfest15! Come visit our booth, share your #jazzlove, and get a free t-shirt!”
From here, you can choose your target audience, who in this example might be local, enjoy jazz, and are following the artists or similar artists. Your tweet will now show up in the Twitter feeds of those you targeted.
Which way is best?
There truly is no right or wrong option for advertising on social media. The best option is to know your audience and followers and discover what they are enjoying about your company and its services. If you’re still not sure which way to go or still wading through the social networking waters, why not check out our free ebook The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Using Social Media for Business? Learn how to navigate the current social offerings, how to get started, and how to use it to grow your business, with tips and tricks to get your business up and running on the social platforms.
ChangeU: For your independent study...
Hootsuite’s Beginners Guide to Social Media Advertising http://bit.ly/1N0U3cD
Why Social Media Advertising is Set to Explode in the Next 3 Years http://mklnd.com/1GCuT2q
