Jul 13, 2020
With the help of smartphones and the ability to scroll through social media apps at any given time, time spent on social media across the world is on the rise and shows no signs of slowing down.
In fact, the average person spends 2 hours and 33 minutes a day on social media.
Social Media Advertising has become an extremely effective way to spend your digital advertising dollars now more than ever. Choosing the best social media platforms to advertise your business is on a key ingredient in your recipe for success!
With so many platforms available, Social Media Advertising is not a one size fits all approach since each platform has a unique audience and their own set of targeting options to reach them.
Between Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, your business can reach the most ideal audience on social media to help accomplish virtually any business goal you may have! With the help of our guide, you will be able to decide which platform or combinations of platforms will best suit your business!
Read on to learn more about each social media platform or just skip ahead to the section you’re most interested in!
Facebook & Instagram
According to Facebook Insights, there are approximately 7 million active advertisers on and your business could be the next to benefit from advertising on this powerhouse of a social media platform.
With Facebook and Instagram being connected, there are more opportunities to reach the most desirable audience to produce impressive results. Whether that be generating brand awareness for your products or services or generating leads to increase your sales, advertising on these platforms is the way to go.
The diverse nature of both Facebook and Instagram allow for advertisers to use the platforms as a standalone product or part of their complete digital marketing solution!
Know Your Goals
The reach across Facebook and Instagram is broad, but they possess robust advertising objectives and unique targeting capabilities, so you can show your ad to a personalized audience!
In terms of objectives, advertisers have the ability to choose the desired outcome of their Facebook and Instagram campaign.
It’s important to know what the goals are of the campaign so you can choose the appropriate objective. This is ultimately the action you want users to take when they see your ad.
Awareness – based objectives work to spark interest in your business. These objectives help increase awareness of your brand and help get your ads seen in front of as many users possible within your target audience.
Brand Awareness and Reach are great for businesses who want to acquire new customers by showcasing their value, change brand perception, or warm up potential customers to what you have to offer.
Overtime, as your business goals shift, consideration and conversion-oriented objectives are available when you are ready to focus your efforts on engagement and encouraging users to take action!
Consideration and conversion– based objectives work to get users to seek more information and take action off the platform. Consideration objectives like Traffic, Engagement, or Lead Generation are valuable for businesses with goals that require actions to be taken. If you are interested in sending people to websites so they can learn more, obtaining information from people via a Lead Ad, or even engagement on your ads, consideration objectives are the way to go.
A step further, conversion objectives are geared towards getting people to take a valuable action like making a purchase or submitting their information on a website.
In order to be able to optimize your ads towards users likely to take those actions, the Facebook Pixel is required.
Using a Facebook Pixel allows the system to track the activity taking place on your website and show your ads to users likely to take those same actions, like making a purchase!
Know Your Targeting Options
While it is important to choose a platform that offers capabilities that will help you achieve your client’s goals, knowing the targeting options on each platform is equally important.This ensures your ads are delivered to the best audience in the most effective way possible.
To pinpoint your target audience, Facebook and Instagram allow you to define your audience with the basics: age, gender, and location.
With the abundance of detailed targeting options like demographics, interests, and behaviors you can really hone in on a relevant audience.
Custom Audiences are used to reach people already familiar with your business, so you can use this tactic to target users based off of website traffic or a customer list you may have.
Lookalike audiences help you reach new users who have key similarities to those relevant users in your custom audiences. The targeting options on Facebook and Instagram are endless!
Last but not least, ad format and creative options on each platform are also an important element to consider.
You want to ensure that the platforms you choose have the format and creative that not only aligns with what you are trying to promote, but will resonate with who you are trying to reach! Facebook and Instagram offer a wide variety of creative and format combinations so you can create the most engaging ads possible.
Facebook and Instagram ads can first be structured with a single video, static image, or a slideshow. With those creative types, businesses have the option to utilize different formats to reach their target audience.
To highlight a few strong formats offered on Facebook and Instagram, there are Lead Generation ads. These ads help collect information about people interested in your business upon clicking the call to action button, which takes users to a customized form without ever leaving Facebook or Instagram.
The carousel format is also available, which is a single ad that can showcase a combination of up to ten images or videos. This method is powerful when trying to show different products or tell a visual story across multiple cards.
If your business goals are B2B Marketing or Lead Generation, LinkedIn could be the platform for you! Advertising on LinkedIn is effective when trying to reach a professional audience.
A user’s LinkedIn profile is a first impression to many as you can showcase your skills and expertise.
Users have an incentive to keep their profiles accurate & up to date so rest assured that you are going to reach key decision makers! LinkedIn is the largest business-oriented network and with the combination of their objectives, powerful targeting, and unique ad formats this platform is a one stop shop for reaching the professional audience that matters to your business.
Like any other social advertising platform, the objective you choose is the goal you want to accomplish. The objectives on LinkedIn are also bucketed into the categories of:
Awareness
Consideration
Conversion
If your business goal is to reach a professional audience and introduce them to your brand, Brand Awareness campaigns are there to help you maximize the exposure of your business on Linkedin.
LinkedIn Objectives
Consideration Objectives are great if you are interested in users engaging with your business. Whether that be through engagement or video views on your LinkedIn ads or sending them to your website to learn more information.
If your goals are more focused on conversions, selecting the website conversions objectives will be much more beneficial for your campaign. With this, you will have the ability to track and optimize your campaign towards the actions users take after they reach your website.
LinkedIn also offers a unique conversion objective, Job Applicants. If generating applicants is your goal, this is the objective for you! This objective was created so businesses can promote their open job positions to recruit top talent on Linkedin.
Once you settle on a marketing method and an objective that can accomplish your goals, read on to find out how to reach those users!
When it comes to the reaching key decision makers in a business or viable candidates, LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities are unmatched.
LinkedIn prides itself on the accuracy of their professional targeting. In addition to targeting users by gender, age, and location the strongest targeting options are focused on a user’s company, job title, industry, and education. You can even filter down to professional interests and skills!
LinkedIn data is known to stand out since their users have a professional incentive to keep their profiles accurate and up to date!
In addition to in-platform targeting, you can also use lookalike audiences to reach new professionals with similar traits to your ideal target.
This level of targeting provides the highest accuracy and ensures you are narrowing your audience to those key people that matter.
The unique ad formats on LinkedIn also offer advantages when helping you achieve your business goals. There are formats like sponsored content, also known as ads seen directly in feeds, are great to generate awareness, leads, and engagement.
Text Ads displayed on the side rail, encourage users to drive qualified traffic to your website.
LinkedIn offers the ability to personalize In-Mail for a user’s inbox in the form of Message Ads or Conversation Ads known as Sponsored In-mail.
Sponsored InMail Ads
These ads are powerful because it allows you to send a message to your prospects and engage with them in real-time.
Conversation Ads create more structure to your messages as the recipient will have to choose from a list of actions you created. For Instance, if your Conversation Ad CTA’s can prompt users to select “Request A Demo”, “Tell Me More”, and even “Sign Up For Webinar”.
With Sponsored InMail, LinkedIn will only send messages to users who are active, so you don’t waste your advertising dollars on users who won’t answer or messages that will bounce back.
With Sponsored Content and Mail as well as Text and Dynamic Ads, LinkedIn ad formats can compliment many business goals and objectives.
Twitter is the best platform for your business if you are interested in engaging with users in real time conversation. Twitter is formulated for engagement and fast responses and is the best platform to keep it short and sweet.
Your business has the opportunity to convey a message while finding new ways to capture your audience’s attention! Still not sure if Twitter is the right platform to add into your Social Advertising mix?
If your audience is present on this platform, Twitter has strong objectives, targeting, and ad formats that can help you stand out!
Twitter Objectives to Know
Each of the objectives Twitter offers serves a specific purpose. If your goal is increasing awareness, choosing “Reach” will maximize how many users see your Twitter ads.
Twitter’s consideration objectives are among the most robust offered since this is a social platform that is designed for engagement. Do you want to drive engagement on your Tweets or drive clicks to your website?
The next group of consideration objectives help your business optimize towards goals of video views, app installs, website clicks, engagement, & Twitter followers.
If your business has an app, the App Re-engagement objective helps get users to take action on your app. Twitter is a compatible platform for your business if you are looking to promote your app for installs and re-engagements like in app purchases.
Twitter is all about businesses and users connecting with each other. People join Twitter to see what is happening with the world, join in on trends, and to find something new.
With such a unique audience, Twitter’s targeting options help you reach the right users.
Twitter Targeting Options
Twitter offers traditional targeting (by location, demographics, interests, and keywords) but a feature unique to Twitter is your ability to tap into conversation topics, event targeting, and movie and tv show targeting.
Conversation topics help you reach users based on the types of conversations they are actively engaging with in real time.
Event calendars house different events all over the world, so users can share if they are interested in attending, which allows advertisers to utilize event targeting in their strategy.
Movie and TV show targeting is an option to be used if your business closely aligns with people who are engaging with interests related to specific TV shows and movies.
Business can also benefit from Twitter targeting by device, carrier, and new mobile user targeting as well as tailored and lookalike audiences based on customer lists, your website, or engagement on twitter.
When a platform is designed for conversation, engagement, and fast responses, businesses need to stand out in order to capture user’s attention.
Promoted Tweets
Twitter ads will be featured in a timeline and with the use of ad formats like promoted text, images, videos and GIFs, businesses can reach users as they scroll in their timelines. It is essential to be creative while developing your ads so they can stand out in a feed!
Unique to Twitter, your ad can be formatted as a promoted poll, where users can answer questions in an interactive poll helping you gain insights and receive feedback instantly!
Conclusion
Social Media Advertising is not a one size fits all approach since each platform has a unique audience and their own set of targeting options to reach them.
With the help of this guide, it is our hope that you can now choose the best social media platforms to advertise on!
