Simple Social Media Advertising Tips

We often get asked during our social media training sessions about advertising, particularly on Facebook and Twitter. It's clearly something people are confused about so we wanted to share with you some frequent questions and a few key tips on getting the most from advertising on social.

Why pay for adverts through social media?

From our experience, the brands we've worked with have really benefited from social media advertising, not only achieving objectives (like more Facebook likes or engagement) but have been able to use feedback from adverts in real-time to direct social activity and help plan future initiatives.

We particularly find social media advertising effective as you can reach a mass audience of targeted people very simply and quickly. You can see exactly who is engaging with each advert and what posts are more responsive than others, almost instantly making it more effective for managing budgets too. Also, the great thing is you control the adverts (and budget!) and your audience growth and objectives are based on real data.

It's no surprise that by 2017, social media advertising revenue is set to grow to 11 billion dollars becoming a massive part of advertising buying efforts! 

What's the difference between advertising on Facebook and Twitter?

The obvious difference is you'll probably be targeting different people and you will have different advertising objectives for each platform although the creation of the adverts itself is pretty similar.

Set your objectives...

On Facebook there are a number of types of adverts you can run to meet different objectives. You can optimize adverts for website conversions, page likes, website clicks, post engagement, app installs, app engagement, offer claims and for event replies.

On Twitter it's more simple - you can advertise a specific key message through Promoted Tweets or gain more followers through Promoted Accounts.

Selecting where the advert will appear...

With Facebook adverts can appear in News Feeds or on the right-hand side of the page. Facebook will give you the best option according to the objectives set.

The creative element should be taken into account here as this is where you can upload images (on Facebook) and create different forms of copy (see tips below).

Targeting...

Targeting people by demographics such as location, gender, interests, language or workplace, etc is easy on Facebook so go in with a set target audience in mind.

Over on Twitter there are two types of targeting; keyword and interests & followers. Keyword means you can target those who tweet about, search or engage with a particular term. Interests and followers allows you to target by broad interest categories (like beauty for example) or target those who follow accounts that tweet about categories.

Budgets...

Finally on Facebook you can pick a daily or lifetime budget and decide how you want to pay for actions. For example, you can pay for likes or for impressions. This all depends on your objectives but don't worry, Facebook will help with selection.

On Twitter again, you can set lifetime or daily maximum budgets. If you go down the Promoted Tweet route you set an amount you are willing to pay for every reply, retweet, favourite, click or follow. For Promoted Account adverts you pay per follower.

Do I need to pay someone to create adverts for me?

In a word, no! If you have large budgets to play with and are unsure about creating your adverts of course we'd say to talk to an expert but by no means do you have to. Facebook and Twitter have made it very simple to create your own advertisements and even give you lots of tips and feedback. The process is very straightforward and once you've done one test (maybe with a very small budget) you'll have lots of fun creating and managing your own adverts.

A note here... we've seen some brands allow 'experts' to manage their adverts on social media (there's really no need!) and get exploited in some way, whether it's taking a big percent of the budget for 'fees' (not if you create ads yourself!) or by not understanding the target market or objectives and getting hundreds of likes from Portugal when the company only trades in the UK! Remember, setting up the adverts in one way means every new like the page receives will be paid for so targeting is important, paying for likes in Portugal was very frustrating for the brand!

Key Tips...

• Set objectives before you create the adverts whether that's on Facebook or Twitter. Create a purpose for promoting your content maybe it's to increase Facebook likes, encourage more users to visit your website or to increase awareness - objectives are key and will help you when setting up the adverts
• If possible, create adverts around campaigns, even if it's a small-scale Facebook competition - this will give users even more reason to engage with your advert and give them something to invest their time in online
• Include Facebook advertising in your marketing budget but remember you don't need to spend thousands a month to see results. We've worked with brands before who have moved a very small percentage of their budget into Facebook advertising and gained a lot of traction
• Use a number of creatives... try to use around four different images in one advertising campaign (Facebook will rotate these automatically for you) and use a number of copy alternatives even if it's changing a few words around. This will help you to test what your audience responds to better

Hope that's helped in the seen-to-be confusing world of social media advertising but we promise... it's simple! If you have any questions just email us at smile@katieandjane.com

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Jane x