It comes as no surprise that consumers spend an extraordinary amount of time on social media. We’re willing to bet you even found this post via our Facebook or LinkedIn pages. Did you know that the average person actually spends more than six hours online a day?! If your target market is spending so much of their free time on social media then it makes sense that you should be talking to them via their preferred medium.
Social media advertising is bursting with benefits for businesses, helping companies find new customers by using the information they share online. But with so many platforms offering a variety of social media advertising tools, knowing where to start can be overwhelming. We’ll help you cover some of the basics by guiding you through the right platform.
Facebook Advertising
Choose Your Objective
Facebook Ads are designed around objectives, which means the type of ad you run will be based on what you’d like to accomplish. For example, if you’re looking to use Facebook to drive traffic to your website, then you’ll want to select either “Send People to Your Website” or “Increase Conversions on Your Website” as your objective.
Target Your Audience
With more than 1.49 billion monthly active users, you’ll want to make sure your ads are targeted. Otherwise, it’s like yelling into a very loud and crowded room. Facebook has several different targeting parameters to choose from, such as age, gender, location, purchase behaviour, interests and more.
Enter Your Budget
Enter an amount that you’re comfortable with spending on a daily or weekly basis.
Choose Where to Display Your Ad
Facebook currently offers two locations for ad placement:
- Desktop and mobile News Feeds
News Feed ads appear directly in users’ News Feeds and are the most customizable in the social media advertising space because News Feed ads allow you to adjust the body copy, image, headline, description and vanity URL.
- Right-hand column
Right-hand column ads appear on the right-hand side of most pages, like your Timeline and News Feed. These ads give you the ability to customize the headline, image, URL and description. They don’t offer as much text, but they’re usually less expensive than News Feed ads.
Twitter Advertising
Choose Your Objective
Just like Facebook, Twitter offers you several different objectives to choose from. Once you’ve selected your campaign type, Twitter will provide you with a customized workflow aligned to your campaign goals, complete with recommendations on the best ad format to use.
Target Your Audience
Targeting is a critical component of your advertising campaign no matter which platform you’re on. Like other platforms, Twitter offers some basic targeting options. For example, you can segment by age, gender, location, interests and/or behaviour.
Enter Your Budget
You set your own daily budget for each campaign and Twitter will automatically stop showing your ad once your budget has been met. The pricing system is based on bidding—set the maximum amount you’re willing to spend per action.
Be careful: Twitter Cards take up 24 of your 140 characters. So, focus on brevity.
LinkedIn Advertising
If you’re a B2B company, LinkedIn is definitely a platform you want to consider for social media advertising.
Of course, before you can begin taking advantage of all that LinkedIn Ads has to offer, you’ll need to create a Company Page.
Choose a Campaign Type
When you use the LinkedIn Ads Creation Tool, you’ll need to decide whether you want to create an ad or sponsor content. The small ads visible on the right-hand side of your LinkedIn feed are what you’ll be running if you choose to create an ad. Should you go with sponsor content, you’ll have the ability to distribute your updates to a much larger audience on the LinkedIn network and your sponsor content will appear right in user’s news stream.
Target Your Audience
LinkedIn gives several targeting options to help you reach potential customers, like; company name, company industry, company size, job titles, job functions, job seniority, field of study and/or skills.
Enter Your Budget
LinkedIn’s self-service advertising allows you to set your own budget for campaigns. That said, there are a few minimum costs to advertise in Campaign Manager.
Instagram Advertising
Instagram’s self-serve advertising platform is gradually rolling out and it will be combined in Facebook’s Power Editor. You won’t need an Instagram account—although it’s recommended that you do—but you will be required to have a Facebook Ads account.