Paid Social Media Advertising: The next step for your business?

Social Media is universal in today’s economy. Businesses use it, consumers use it, and even my grandparents use it! Combine social media usage with the growing rate of online research before purchasing and the answer to the above question seems obvious. With paid social media advertising, you put your business in front of people on platforms they look at literally every single day. With paid advertising you can target how you spend your ad budget to make sure only the type of people you want to see it, see it.  And you can potentially reach more people in an hour on social media than a week with print advertisement.

Here we have selected 4 of the top Social Media platforms to explore. First, for all of these social media platforms, in order to start with paid advertising you must have a business account. Once that is set up, you need content (like posts, tweets, pins and videos) to promote. If you are already using these social media platforms organically (not paying for them) with decent results, paid social media advertising is a good next step to improve your results and bring in new customers.

1. FACEBOOK – You can’t argue with volume and with Facebook at approximately 175M people logging in everyday, they have the user base. With Facebook you can create your own ads or boost any post you have created. Then you determine who you want to see your advertisement by age, geography, gender and interests. For a few dollars, your ad will be placed in the news feed of 100s of users. Facebook tracks how many people saw your ad, how many shared, liked and clicked thru to your page. Facebook is a particularly good place to spend your ad $s if your business only services a specific geography.
2. TWITTER – Twitter specializes in the “Right Now” and can be a great place to focus your social media dollars. They have different types of campaigns, including audience growth, App promoting, website traffic growth and brand awareness advertisements. Since tweets are text based, they can be really easy to create. However, Twitter success stories always rely on 2-way communication between businesses and followers, so be prepared to spend enough time for great engagement.
3. PINTEREST– Pinterest is a retailer’s dream app! It is visually pleasing and tailored to attract people with images. Already on Pinterest, but not getting huge results? You can reach more people searching for your types of products by promoting your pins on Pinterest to specific types of people and/or specific search terms. You own the visual, the targeting and the way you pay – per engagement or per website visit. And Pinterest lets you track repins, clicks, impressions and how much you are spending to make it easy to stay in budget while getting results.
4. YOUTUBE – The big difference with YouTube is storytelling! With video, you can tell why you started your business, how you are growing your business or how your business has impacted your community. If your business has a great story to tell, then YouTube could be the perfect avenue to reach a broader audience. YouTube lets you target your audience by age, gender, location and interests. You can control your budget on a daily basis to make sure you stay on track. The big difference with YouTube is, of course, that you need a video advertisement to get started, which can be hugely impactful, but a bigger investment up front.

My advice is to start with one social media platform and focus there before expanding into 3 or 4 campaigns. And make sure your advertisements are relevant, eye catching and interesting – they have to be scroll-stopping to get noticed!

And of course, if you want to get started on Social Media Advertising without managing it yourself, SocialTrend is here to help 😉