It’s been all about social media the past few years. Since Facebook turned the world of online friendship upside-down in 2006 and Twitter made 140 character conversations explode in the same year, the way we interact with each other online has never been the same. Soon after the word got out, people started flocking to these social networking sites, and so did businesses.
Despite the amount of users Facebook (890 million active daily users), Twitter (284 million active monthly users), and all the other popular social platforms have, it can be hard for businesses to stand out among the masses. It’s even harder, to get people to want to engage with you when there’s so much going on. Users don’t want their feeds to be bogged down with overly promotional stories – that’s where paid social media ads come in to play. Sometimes the best way to rise above the constant noise of other businesses and brands on social media is to invest in some paid ads on those networks. We’ll walk you through the basics of advertising on the biggest networks, along with why you should really consider making an investment, even a small one, into paid social media ads.
Facing Your Customers On Facebook
We can say Facebook is the leader of social networking until we are blue in the face. So, let’s give these claims some perspective. In a recent installment of Moz's Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin presents some seriously compelling data. He explains that Facebook drives about 1.8 to 3.6 billion referrals per day. Just for reference, Google drives about 9 to 18 billion referrals per day. We can gather from Facebook’s referral data that they are probably driving more referral traffic than all of the smaller search engines (Yahoo, Bing, etc.) combined.
Now, it’s clear that Facebook is no Google when it comes to search, but many industry professionals believe Facebook is rapidly becoming a search resource, not just a social networking platform. The data presented proves Facebook’s ability to send referral traffic to any site. Using their paid amplification resources can be a really good idea if you already see a steady amount of traffic from Facebook each month. Even if you’re just starting out on Facebook, investing in some paid advertising can get eyes on your content, profile, and website.
Facebook gives you a ton of options for ads programs. Granted, their ads can never be as precise or targeted as Google’s AdWords, but the value is still there. Facebook’s CPC (cost per click) and CPI (cost per impression) tend to be much more affordable than traditional AdWords costs. To break it down, CPC is calculated when a user actually clicks on ads that appear in their newsfeed or sidebar, while CPI is determined when those ads are visible in newsfeeds and/or sidebars. Even more, Facebook is working to improve their CPI data to ensure you only pay for real views to combat the rise in fake bot-driven impressions.
Here, you can create straightforward ads that will appear in users’ newsfeeds and/or sidebars, boosted posts, and offers. Each of these options has its best times and place, and with Facebook’s detailed ads dashboard, you have a lot of control over how and when your ads appear. You can target these ads based on location, behaviors, demographics, connections, and interests of users. Their ads program aims to give you deep control over the exact audience you wish to target.
Finally, Facebook tends to be relatively flexible when it comes to ads budgets. Based on your desired spend, you can choose the frequency of ads per day. Even better, you can determine a spending cap for your ads program. Sometimes your budget is used up far before your determined end date. This can happen when your ads perform better than expected, gaining more CPC and/or CPI than anticipated. Instead of exceeding your spending cap to match your desired end date, Facebook ads end when your money is up. This ensures more control over your investment.
Tweak Your Tweets
As mentioned, Twitter has 284 million monthly users. On average, there are 500 million tweets sent out on Twitter every day. Due to the large number of tweets per day, the life of any given tweet is about 20 minutes. So, you have only 20 minutes to engage users to view, share, favorite, retweet, and click-through to your site. This is where Twitter for Business proves to be an extremely valuable tool. Instead of your tweets getting lost in a sea of 500 million per day, you can design an ads campaign to help them stand out.
Twitter has one of the most robust social media paid advertising platforms in terms of depth of targeting. The nature of your ads and audience are almost limitless. First, you have four major ways to target ads on Twitter – objective-based campaigns, promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends. Similar to Facebook ads, the four options of Twitter ads are designed to target your specific goals, whether that’s more engagement on a particular tweet, more followers, a trending hashtag, etc. With each program, you have the freedom to target users based on who they follow, what keywords they’ve tweeted and searched, their interests and demographics, and a lot more.
Twitter’s ads are designed to drive website clicks and conversions, not just gain impressions. These are also focused on gaining followers and increasing engagement for your Twitter profile. Their powerful dashboard allows you to fully customize your desired ad – you have almost total control over every detail. Furthermore, you’re given access to in-depth analytics and an on-demand help team.
Finally, Twitter’s pricing works similar to that of Facebook’s pricing. Twitter boasts that you “pay only for performance”. This is a welcome change to the discrepancies over Facebook and Google’s bot-driven impressions issues. Twitter only charges you when a user takes an action you designated in your ad design. Like Facebook, pricing works based on bids here. You set limits for how much you’re willing to pay for given actions. If you’re new to social ads, they give accurate suggestions about what bids may be based on your ad design. Usually, your bids come under the limit you’ve set, saving you money and extending the life of your campaigns. Again, Twitter ads allow you to set a pricing cap. When you’ve met your total budget, your ads automatically stop running. There’s no risk of over-extending yourself here.
We hope you now have a good understanding of how paid social media advertising works, and hopefully you see the value in the investment. Advertising with Google AdWords can be really difficult if you’re new to the world of paid promotions. Even though social ads may not be as targeted or boast huge search numbers like Google does, this does not mean they are not effective. We recommend trying social ads for one month. Pick your desired network, set your budget to not exceed $50, and see what happens. More likely than not, you’ll “like” paid social media ads.