Making The Shift From Organic To Paid Social Media
You know you need to diversify your marketing efforts to reach today’s multichannel consumers. You’ve done the research and you’ve identified social media as a place your customers spend a lot of their time. Now what?
You may already have a company LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram page, but with social media networks increasingly looking to monetize their users, organic reach is at an all-time low.
Making the shift from organic to paid traffic is one of the quickest and most effective ways to get in front of your customers. And each social channel has capabilities to boost views and engagement with those most likely to buy your products or services.
Facebook is social media’s most popular channel, with more than two billion people scrolling, clicking and sharing each month.
Facebook’s popularity with users is due, in part, to the variety of content forms it supports. From text and images to videos and live stories, Facebook is designed to spark conversations and ignite interaction.
The versatility that makes Facebook popular with users also makes it a popular choice for companies looking to advertise on it.
From choosing your ad campaign’s objective and ad type (image, video, carousel, dynamic, etc.) to building out your audience using robust demographic, interest and behavior selects, Facebook equips you with the tools you need to effectively target your audience and optimize your paid social budget.
Once considered a resume and job search site, LinkedIn has evolved into a professional social community where both industry leaders and businesses can share content, network and build their brands.
While LinkedIn doesn’t have the user numbers Facebook does, it still serves a distinct purpose for advertisers. As its users are mostly business professionals, LinkedIn is widely considered to be the best social channel for B2B lead generation.
LinkedIn—like Facebook—allows you to choose an ad campaign objective. With your objective set, you can sponsor content in the news feed or InMail directly into your target’s LinkedIn inbox. Or you can buy ads featured next to the news feed.
LinkedIn also allows you to target your audience based on specific selects such as company, experience, education and interests.
It’s true that Twitter has seen a decline in users over the last few years. However, the character-counting platform still boasts over 300 million active users each month and comes with some distinct advantages, including an emphasis on real-time information, a large international audience and unique ad-targeting features.
Twitter offers two ways to create ads: Twitter Promote and Twitter Ads. With Twitter Promote, Twitter uses an algorithm to automatically promote your ten most recent tweets to your target audience based on selected objective, interests and location.
With Twitter Ads, you are in control of the campaign—selecting the campaign objective as well as targeting options (language, gender, device, behavior, etc.) and content.
Instagram not only has nearly 500 million daily users, but it is also one of the highest visited platforms by millennials and Gen Z.
Since Instagram is owned by Facebook, it makes sense that it has similar flexibility in features (photos, videos, stories and live videos) and advertising options.
Like Facebook, Instagram allows you to pick an ad objective and target based on location, demographics interests and behavior, however Instagram’s targeting options are less robust.
While Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram are some of the most popular social channels we see our clients use successfully, there are other channels that can be leveraged as part of a paid social advertising strategy—including YouTube, Snapchat and Pinterest.
The key to choosing which social channels are right for your business is understanding who your target buyers are and where they like to get information, and then evaluate which options make sense based on your objectives and budget. Then all that’s left to do is meet them there.