An affordable way to reach more niche customers.

What is paid social media advertising?

In today's business landscape, you need to pay to play. No more so than on social media. The days of utilising your organic reach are effectively over – posting organically and expecting all your followers to see your posts and content. Now social media platforms expect you to invest in paid social media advertising.

That mindset of posting organically has disappeared for a few years now. It is all about targeting your demographic, building customer journeys and getting versions to your website to make a purchase or sign up. Paid social media ads help do precisely that.

Paid social media advertising displays advertisements or sponsored marketing messages on popular social media platforms and targets a specific sub-audience. Pay-per-click advertising, branded or influencer-generated content, and display ads are all examples of paid social media.

However, the real obstacle in understanding paid social media advertising is how to get started, how each network operates, and how much you will need to spend. That is why brands turn to our social media specialists to guide and execute their paid social media ads.

If you are just getting started, it is essential to understand the basics of paid social media advertising. Every organisation operates differently, so having a strategy tailored to your company is critical. The problem is knowing where to start.

Facebook Ads

When it comes to paid social ads, Facebook is unquestionably king. Building audiences, targeting specific user demographics, retargeting individual groups and measuring success is critical to any brand.

Facebook is currently, and most likely will remain, the biggest social media advertising platform. There are 2.963 billion daily active users on Facebook as of January 2023.

Facebook is widely recognised as the leader in social media advertising trends. Facebook advertising works for almost every business and is a great place to start with social advertising. Facebook offers social media advertising to companies and businesses to reach audiences based on the campaign objectives. A few options include campaigns to drive awareness, engagement, traffic, conversions and shop visits.

In addition to various ad formats, Facebook offers targeting options that allow advertisers to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviours. Facebook can also target users based on where people shop, travel, and more.

Facebook presently allows users to post ads using a photo, video, carousel, slideshow, and Facebook Instant Experiences.

• Carousel is a feature that allows users to show up to 10 images or videos and links within one advertisement. Thus, allowing advertisers to direct people to multiple places on their website with one creative.

• Slideshow is a feature that allows users to create video advertisements from still images.

• Instant Experiences is a tool that advertisers can use to create immersive advertisements using a photo, videos, text, carousels, product feeds, and more, all in one streamlined page. This page lives in the Facebook app, making it a swift and seamless experience for the user. Each tool offers benefits depending on the advertising campaign's goal and the content available to the advertiser.

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Instagram Ads

Instagram, too, uses the Meta Business Manager – it is an excellent second step into paid social media ads, especially if brands have highly visual content to publish. 

Visuals are one of, if not the most, essential element of an Instagram advertising campaign creative. It does not matter if you are selling the best product in the world with the best customer service. If you have poor visuals, your Instagram campaign will suffer.

Instagram ads can be in the same format as Facebook: photo, video, carousel, slideshow, and Instant Experiences. Instagram also allows users to structure a campaign based on the campaign objective, such as website clicks, conversions, app installs, engagements, video views, and awareness. Instagram advertisers can target their ads the same way as Facebook ads.

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Twitter Ads

Several brands see extensive success with Twitter advertising. Over 330 million monthly active Twitter users are tweeting away and scrolling through their feeds. Twitter offers several forms of paid advertisements to reach these users. Twitter advertisers can select the objective they want to achieve for their business, whether that be increased traffic, engagement, awareness, video views, followers, app installs, or app re-engagements.

Like Facebook, Twitter also offers to target paid advertisements based on location, gender, language, device, platform, and carrier.

Twitter has two distinct differences from most other social platforms. Twitter includes targeting by keywords to reach people based on their Pinterest searches. Twitter also includes an option to target people similar to users who follow specific accounts.

For example, if you want to target people who are like people who follow your competitors, you could include your competitors' Twitter accounts in the target audience. It is essential to know that you are not targeting the specific followers of these accounts. You are targeting users who are like those followers.

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Pinterest Ads

Pinterest advertising clicks so well with Pinners; it is inspiring. Pinterest is a discovery platform; in other words, more like a search engine. Almost all searches on Pinterest are unbranded, meaning Pinners are open to discovering new ideas and products. 

Seventy-three per cent of Pinner's state content from brands makes Pinterest more beneficial.

Pinterest reached over 445 million monthly active Pinterest users as of September 2022. Pinterest advertising offers campaigns based on an advertising objective.

Pinterest's advertising objectives include awareness, engagement, traffic, app downloads, and video awareness. Additionally, Pinterest offers a few different ways to shape audience targeting.

Advertisers can target audiences based on interests and keywords. When targeting by interests, Pins will show in users' homes and category feeds based on a user's past interests and the category's topic. Advertisers can select from various interest categories, each with additional segments.

When targeting by keywords, advertisers can select phrases and words similar to a user's search. This targeting places Pins in a user's search results. It is best practice to include keywords and interests in a campaign to reach people in both places.

Pinterest also offers custom engagement or email list targeting and some demographic information. Demographic information, such as location targeting, is more limited than other platforms.

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TikTok Ads

If you want to advertise on TikTok, know your demographic - TikTok is ideal for targeting Gen Z. However, do you know the basics of creating and scheduling TikTok ads? How much do they cost? How do you measure them? A TikTok advertising strategy is about creating video ads, not images.

TikTok ads target viewers based on demographics, interests, and behaviours. Advertisers can create ads in the form of video, image, or hashtag challenges. The ads are then shown to the target audience through sponsored videos, ads in the For You feed, hashtag challenges, or promoted trends.

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YouTube Ads

With over 1.3 billion users, YouTube has become more than a place to watch videos – it is the world's second most visited search engine behind Google.

Social media advertising companies recommend YouTube advertising for businesses with short video advertisements ranging from 6 to 15 seconds to be used in TruView in-stream ads. These advertisements appear before a user watches the intended video. A social media advertising company might also recommend YouTube advertising for companies with longer video advertisements appearing in search results called TruView discover ads.

If a business has either of these assets to use in YouTube ads, it can target the ads to people based on demographics, interests, and keywords.

LinkedIn Ads

Last but certainly not least is LinkedIn ads. Advertising on the world's largest professional network has its tricks and can be costly on a click-by-click basis but unquestionably has its benefits, particularly for B2B brands. 

LinkedIn offers advertisers three different ad products depending on the goals of a campaign:

• Sponsored Content

• Sponsored InMail

• Text Ads

They have sponsored content places content in the LinkedIn feed. Sponsored InMail sends content to LinkedIn users via a message to their inbox. Text ads are delivered in locations around the LinkedIn feed on a desktop.

LinkedIn's targeting particularly shines when it comes to employee and company-specific targeting. Industry, position, seniority, and company size are a few ways LinkedIn allows businesses to hone in on a target audience in addition to age and location demographics.

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