More businesses are using social media for advertising today and due to the overcrowding on the platforms organic reach has become an issue. Consequently, businesses are opting paid social media advertising to help reach their target audience much easier.

The reason is that using the social media platforms tools and data makes it easier to target customers. So, it assists with increasing brand reach, creating awareness, driving more traffic to a website, increasing engagement with target audience, increasing conversions, growing sales, and better targeting.

Despite the increased chances presented by social media, some businesses have not taken advantage of the opportunity and still struggling with organic reach. Thus, we have generated a guide on the different types of ads and how businesses can get started with social media advertising focusing on top social media platforms.

Advertising on Facebook

Currently, Facebook is the most popular social media platform globally with more than 2.6 billion monthly active users MAUs (Clement, 2020). Thus, it has become a perfect platform to target a wide audience. The best way to target this audience is through Facebook Ad Manager. Facebook Ad Manager is easy to use for any type of business. The tool gives you the following options for your campaign,  

  • Send people to your website
  • Increase conversions on your website
  • Boost your posts
  • Promote your page
  • Get installs of your app
  • Increase engagement in your app
  • Reach people near your business
  • Raise attendance at your event
  • Get people to claim your offer
  • Get video views

To begin, start by entering the page you want to promote and then choose your target audience from the options provided by Facebook. The options include Location, age, gender, languages, interests, and behaviors. After that you will choose your budge and schedule your ad and that’s all.  

Advertising on Instagram

Instagram ads are very similar to Facebook ads since Facebook owns Instagram. Since they are one company, you can link your campaigns on Facebook and Instagram through the Facebook business manager. Just like on Facebook ads, you can target your audience by their behaviors, location, demographics, and interests.

Twitter

Through Twitter advertising, you can get what Facebook offers and additional ones. For instance, you can use Twitter campaigns to gain more followers, generate more website clicks or conversions, increase engagement, grow the number of mobile app installs, or generate leads on Twitter.

There are also custom options. To start running your ad on Twitter, you start by setting time for your campaign, then write a tweet, add website URL, add an image, and then select the call to action CTA such as learn more, apply here, shop now, and read more with a link to where you need your target audience to land.

Targeting can be done by location (You can chose multiple locations), gender, language, devices, keywords, platforms & carriers, interests, and behaviors.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the best advertising platform for business to business B2B. advertising on the platform is easier for B2B because it has been tailored to enhance businesses connections. As business you can choose to create an ad or sponsor content on LinkedIn.

The campaign allows you to reach targeted audiences with ads featuring text, images, or videos, or you can sponsor existing or new content to help reach a wider audience. To run an ad, you will start by naming your ad campaign, select language and name for your campaign (LinkedIn supports 24 languages), and then you will need to add variations (LinkedIn supports 15 ad variations).

Under each ad in these variations you get to add a web page to promote, a 25-character headline, a 75-character description, and an image in JPEG, PNG, or GIF. Targeting is done through member-generated demographic data including job title, company, industry, and seniority etc.  

Social media is becoming a part of our daily life. So, as a business you need to rethink your advertising efforts and reach your audience where they are found. People are spending more time on social media for entertainment or trying to get product and service suggestions. This makes the platforms an ideal place to grow your business.

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Reference

Clement, J. (2020, August 21). Most used social media platform. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

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Social media marketing