Investing in social media should be part of every digital marketer’s campaign. However, simply creating accounts, posting content, and engaging with followers doesn’t hold the same weight it used to. Thanks to ever changing algorithms the game has changed. Communicating your message and promoting your brand on social media for free is still ideal, but engaging customers with paid social media has become increasingly popular and successful.
Adding a paid element to your posts helps to expand their reach and increase engagement among your fans, followers, and friends. The good news is that paid promotion on social media is cost effective and can be done no matter what the size of your business. We’ll look at a breakdown of the basic elements for each platform so you can decide what strategy might work for your brand.
Facebook offers both paid advertising and an ability to boost organic posts. Paid advertising allows you to create ads and target your audience by location, gender, education and interests. Advertising on Facebook can be done for as little as a few dollars a day and can help boost traffic to a variety of sources. You’ll be asked to choose an objective including some of the following:
- Sending people to your site
- Increasing conversions
- Promoting your page
- Reach people near your business
- Raise attendance for your event
Facebook’s ad platform offers a variety of options for you to create a specific target audience that you feel is the best fit for your message. You can create an ad set with up to six different images, allowing you to test which ads perform the best and further improve your campaign. One of the most important features of this platform is the ability to select a call-to-action button for your ads. You can choose from options like “learn more,” “sign up,” “contact us”, and more to best reach your goal. If you’re new to social media ads and need a little help setting up your first campaign, take a look at our basic Facebook ad tutorial.
One of the most cost effective ways to promote your Facebook page is through boosting a post. It is a great way to pay to promote your content and expand your branding. This option consists of promoting your status updates in order to have more individuals see them. Boosting a post allows you to select the type of users you want to reach and also allows you to determine how long you would like the post to be boosted for. A simple boosting strategy can expand your social media reach for a few dollars! However, an important thing to note here is that post boosting is recommended for when your primary goal is to get your branding in front of a large audience or garner more engagement for particular posts. Targeted Facebook ad campaigns, as discussed above, are recommended if your goals are more conversion driven–you want to send users to your website, get them to claim an offer, etc.
LinkedIn offers paid content promotion similar to Facebook’s platform. If you have a company page and share updates from your company blog or guest posts from other sources, this platform is going to be a good choice for you. LinkedIn allows you to target individuals by job title, location, and much more. In addition to this it also provides an opportunity to exclude competitors from seeing your updates, which is useful if you are sharing insider secrets. LinkedIn allows you to target for how long you would like the campaign to run as well as monitoring it’s progress.
Promoting a pin on Pinterest is a great way to reach your target demographic. While Promoted Pins were reserved for a select group at one time, in January of 2015 they were rolled out to the masses. Promoted Pins look similar to regular pins, the only difference is there is text at the bottom that says “Promoted Pin”. These Pins can be targeted by gender and location much like promoted content on other social media platforms.
This advertising option is fantastic for companies that place a heavy emphasis on the visual appeal of their products. As buyable pins begin to rollout it is even more important for ecommerce brands to make Pinterest advertising a key strategy. Use strong images and the right copy and we’re sure you’ll have success.
Twitter offers an option for promoted products including promoted accounts, promoted tweets, and promoted trends. Twitter’s platform allows businesses to identify objectives for the campaign and narrow down the audience to reach the right individuals as well. Recently they’ve added even more options for targeting including specific pre-determined audiences. Although promoting a trend is extremely expensive (think $200k) promoted tweets are much more affordable and fairly simple to set-up. They are a great way to drive people to a link, gain followers, or get your message out there.
The best part about paying to promote content on social media is that everything can be tracked through analytics. Unless you have a large budget you probably won’t want to promote every post on your social channels. However, it is most certainly beneficial to promote select posts in order to reach your audience, raise brand awareness, and drive traffic back to your website. Determine which platform is the best for your business and always make sure to include an attractive image in your promotional efforts. Not sure where to start? Feel free to reach out to us!
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