When you want to advertise on a specific social media network you need to understand that platform. I believe that you can’t just start driving a Tesla if you don’t have a car license or you’ve never driven a car before.
Do you know where you want to advertise?
This is why before starting to design social media ads you have to understand the network where you want to advertise.
I don’t believe that we should use every social media platform. But I strongly recommend to every business who wants to start using social media to only use the ones that work with their product and audience. Let’s say that you are a B2B company and you want to start doing business with seniors and professionals in your area, this is why you should use a social network like LinkedIn.
According to Moz, there are 3 categories of social media platforms:
- Owned properties: that includes blogs, forums or homegrown social networks (this property is 100% under your control)
- Rented properties: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Linkedin (even if you have an official claim to your brand page, but you have no claim to the platform itself)
- Occupied properties: Reddit, Quora or Imgur. (even if this category is the most removed from your control, but you still can have an official representative who engage with the community).
Many marketers think that social media is more about marketing and less about engaging. Well my friends, let me tell you this: you can’t force love on social media.
That means that even if you create social media ads and you conduct a social media ad campaign, you still have to create valuable content for your community, engage with it, give your audience a reliable customer service or give them the solution for their day-to-day problems.
So, before you start doing social media ad campaigns, I strongly recommend you to write down a social media strategy, start experimenting and knowing your audience and see what you can do more for them every day.
But today’s social media is getting more and more difficult. So you need to stand out from the crowd. And sometimes we need to push our work, our product and our brand a little bit more forward.
Advertisers worldwide will spend $23.68 billion on paid media to reach consumers on social networks this year, according to new figures from eMarketer, a 33.5% increase from 2014. By 2017, social network ad spending will reach $35.98 billion, representing 16.0% of all digital ad spending globally.
And it feels like a social media platform unveils a new advertising tool every single week. But you need to work smarter and try to play the right game for your customers.
This is why I believe understand the platform where you want to advertise is so important.
For example, if you want to advertise on Instagram, you need to know some insights about the platform, who is using it and what are the pros/cons of this platform. Think about that, Instagram has a highly engaged global community with more than 500 Million active users that share daily 95M posts and more than 80% of them are outside the US. But Instagram is mainly a mobile based platform, so your audience is that kind of audience that uses mobile devices on a regular basis.
If you want to do advertising on Instagram you should know that you can send people to your website (make sure that it’s responsive for mobile devices), get people to take specific actions on your landing pages, get people to install and engage with mobile apps, show a video story, make them engage (comment and like) your ad and drive awareness to a broader audience. But how do I know all of these specific tactics Instagram does with their advertising strategy? By looking on their website.
So, to help you read about the top social networks where you can advertise and learn more about their ad specs and other information, I will share with you their link, so you don’t have to start searching them on Google:
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-basics
Instagram – https://business.instagram.com/advertising
Twitter – https://business.twitter.com/en/advertising.html
Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/ad/start
Pinterest – https://business.pinterest.com/en/promoted-pins
YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/yt/advertise/
Let me give you a few statistics from brands that used social media ads on different platforms and gained great results:
[Tweet “Heineken Light get 54% of audience (35 million people) in just 3 days using video ads on Facebook.”]●Adore Me saw a 4000% increase in Pinterest-referred revenue after using Promoted Pins to reach new customers. (Bannersnack)
●Targeted Status Updates on LinkedIn, ADP’s Company Page followers doubled to 85,000. (LinkedIn)
●Philadelpia saw an 8pt lift in message association, an 8pt lift in purchase intent and 41% sales uplift with their Instagram Ads. (Bannersnack)
●Airbnb achieved an engagement rate of over 4% for one of their Promoted Tweets. (Twitter)
Did I change your mind about the power of social media advertising? I hope so.
Every platform has a specific type of content that has a good traction. Even if we talk about Facebook that gives a lot of freedom when it comes to content (image posts, video, text, instant articles). What you need to remember is that each and every one of them has a specific type of content that is that platform’s star. For example, on Pinterest, the best type of content you could use are the infographics, on Instagram are the photos and lately on Facebook what’s working the best are the native videos.
So? Will you adopt these ideas?