While paying to reach your own social following may sound ridiculous, doing so drives more engagement and more conversions than other strategies.
Advertising on social media is becoming very necessary to compete in today’s marketing landscape. In the United States, 73% of the population (or more than 230 million people) has at least one active social networking profile. Social networks are taking advantage of this growth by offering increased exposure if your brand advertises on their platform. In fact, total advertising revenue for social networks this year is estimated at $25.14 billion. By 2018, the number of social media users around the world will reach 2.5 billion. With those numbers, it is easy to see why everyone is paying to play the social media game and keeping their online presence fully optimized.
What Social Media Profiles Do You Need?
Facebook is still undoubtedly the social media leader with nearly 1.5 billion active users. While Facebook started the social networking game, it also laid the groundwork for social media advertising by publishing their first ad in 2005. With Facebook’s news feed algorithms slowly whittling out brand-generated content, you essentially have to pay in order to have your posts actually reach people.
Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are also rapidly gaining more mainstream popularity, and their combined 700 million monthly users cannot be ignored. Developing a marketing strategy that targets the right social media platforms is a cost effective way for your brand to target potential customers.
Advertising on Social Media Platforms
While it is clear your business should be advertising on social media, understanding how to connect with relevant users is key. Every social media platform has its own marketing methodology, so it is important to remember that advertising campaigns are not one size fits all. Based on your business goals, targeting the right demographics with customized engagement strategies on multiple platforms is essential.
Facebook offers a dozen advanced targeting options that can reach 864 million global daily users, including 703 million mobile users.
- Photo, video, link, and text ads can be placed in news feeds and visible on all devices. Users spend the majority of their time on this platform viewing their news feed, making click-through rates (CTR) higher, and costs per click (CPC) lower.
- Contained in Facebook users’ profiles is an unending amount of personal data. Their age, gender, location, likes, and interests all make for advanced targeting opportunities like no other. Through your business page, you can customize audiences by a range of factors and track their conversions on your website.
Twitter provides a more interactive relationship with users by giving advertisers the opportunity to drive conversations within the 500 million tweets sent each day.
- Twitter campaigns focus on gaining followers by targeting what they tweet about and who they follow. Keywords, interests, account lists, and competitor networks can all be used to gain new fans.
- Promoted accounts and tweets are visible to targeted audiences in their timelines while trend ads boost themselves in highly visible Trending Topic positions.
- Using images and hashtags greatly increases your potential consumer engagement, so ad campaigns can and should be individually branded.
Instagram is unique in that it is primarily mobile-based and visual content focused. With 200 million monthly active users, it is the fastest-growing mobile social networking app.
- Instagram advertising uses a sponsored post format that places visually stunning photos directly in the main feed to a broadly targeted audience.
- Advertisers must have an established Instagram following, so building a strong foundation now is essential to getting started.
- Because Facebook owns Instagram, you can easily manage campaigns on both platforms through the Facebook ad portal.
With their recent rollout of Promoted Pins (boosted content posts) and Buyable Pins, Pinterest is the newest to the social media advertising realm. Particularly useful for ecommerce, Pinterest has based their advertising platform on targeting consumers doing product research and preparing for future purchases.
- By tying your Pinterest ad campaign to your ecommerce store, you can promote crossover purchasing by targeting users based on what content they are pinning.
- Video ads are coming soon on Pinterest, but animated gifs are currently supported to catch users eyes as they scroll their home feed.
LinkedIn is the premier social networking platform for affluent, educated professionals. Of the 600 million global professionals, more than 300 million of them are on LinkedIn.
- Sponsored updates are designed to drive quality leads and build relationships, making it the perfect platform for B2B advertising. You can target individuals by industry, job field, and job title and reach the types of consumers most likely to convert.
- Sponsored InMail allows you to send personalized offers directly to the mailboxes of targeted LinkedIn users.
Boost Your Presence on Social Media
Scale can help your business expand its presence in the social media marketing game. By helping you generate more leads and increase conversion rates, we can show you why advertising on social media should be a top priority in your marketing strategy.
To build your online brand and boost your social media strategy, contact Scale to speak with one of our Arkansas online marketing specialists at 501-588-3199.
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