Social media is the biggest player in the modern marketing arena, with almost every brand and business having one or more social media profiles. However, organic reach across social media channels is continuing to decline.
Organic reach on the downfall means it’s becoming harder to reach new audiences on social media as most of your followers are less likely to see the content you put out, even if they follow your accounts. This is because Facebook and Instagram claim they are trying to make user experience more effective, by cutting down the number of branded messages in your social feeds.
Despite this change, there is a solution for businesses – paid adverts on social media. Paid ads are a great way of promoting your business online, helping to extend reach, raise online visibility and gain higher impressions.
Before running an advert, it is important to focus on what the company wants. For example, are you looking to gain followers, increase business awareness or get higher engagement?
When you have decided on your main objective, you need to assess what social media site is going to be the best fit for your business and what it is you’re going to promote.
On Twitter, you can’t just buy an advert. Instead, you must bid for the advert space like an online auction. You bid against other similar types of a businesses all competing for that one slot, which will dictate how much your budget is for the advert. However, you can promote tweets which is a more cost-effective option and will help to achieve higher reach and impressions. Buying a promoted topic on Twitter can get your message visible in the trending topics section, but it can cost in the region of £250,000 for a day.
Though Facebook usage has declined over recent months, it still remains the most popular social network. Adverts are created using the Business Manager section, where you can set advert goals, who you want to target and how much you want to spend. You must use Business Manager to set up Instagram adverts, but you can also create adverts to go across both Facebook and Instagram.
Perhaps the most important social network for businesses is LinkedIn. Running paid adverts on this platform is done through Campaign Manager where you can get very specific on who you are targeting; you can narrow your ad field down by job title, company or location and you can even exclude people you don’t want to see your advert.
To conclude, the main factor businesses need to focus on is ensuring they have original content on their social media profiles running regularly. By promoting this content using frequent paid adverts, they will increase their chances of reaching followers and achieving greater engagement.
Paid adverts are useful for targeting specific businesses and areas your organisation isn’t currently reaching. Ads do offer results so for all companies wanting to get their content out to a wider audience, it’s a worthwhile exercise.