SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING

Pay to be Seen

When you’re trying to build your brand having to do some paid advertising seems inevitable. Advertising on Social Media is a great way to get your product in front of people and hopefully achieve some of that much desired conversion.

In this guide we will look at two of the options you have when it comes to Social Media Advertising.

Advertising on Facebook

Before you get started you need to set up a Facebook Business account. Besides managing your adverts through this you can also manage your page.

Once you’re set up you are ready to start creating your first ad. The first thing you need to focus on is what your target is – what are you trying to achieve with the ad. Facebook gives you some options such as Fans, Website click, etc.

Next you set your target audience. Facebook lets you target people based on age, geography, interests and behaviours.

Imagery

You need to get some good imagery. You can overlay your image with text for even more impact, but be aware that Facebook has some pretty strict rules regarding their image to text ratio. You want to use imagery which easily conveys what it is that you are offering. If you don’t have any imagery or have some imagery, but are unsure as to how to edit it – check out our guide on Imagery.

What to say

Finally there’s the text. Remember to keep it simple. Catchy, humorous or even weird can be good, but mainly works if you’re already an established brand, or if you have a big marketing budget and are trying to build a strong narrative around your brand. For most of us though, we want to get to the point, to make sure that it is clear from the beginning what it is we have to offer.

A good rule of thumb is to shape your copy around the benefits of your product. You want the people who see your advert to understand what problem your product helps them solve.

Testing

Each campaign you run can have multiple ads. Take advantage of this. Start out with a small budget and see which of your adverts gets the best response. However, as always with AB testing, don’t run four wildly different ads, only try minor differences, such as using the same copy but different images or same image with a different tag-line, or even try using the same ads but make changes to your target groups. Once you’ve found a formula that seems to work for your different target groups you have a solid foundation to start building bigger campaigns.

For more on how to use Facebook Ads check out Facebook’s help section.

Twitter Ads

Like with Facebook ads Twitter lets you set an overall objective and audience. Even better, Twitter lets you target people who are following specific people and brands, which means you can target people who are following your competitors.

Once you’ve set your target audience you can build your ads. Your ad consists of a tweet, an image or video, a headline and your target URL. You can also choose to re-use some of your tweets which is handy, if you have tweets which have proven really popular previously.

Multiple Ads

Twitter recommends that you create multiple ads to run within one campaign. Take the same approach as with the Facebook ads and create a series of ads with the same imagery but slightly different copy or calls to action, or use the same copy but use different imagery.

And again – remember to tell people which problem you are the solution to.

Time and Budget

For both Facebook and Twitter ads you can set a time-frame and a budget. Twitter also asks you to set a maximum bid on your ads. This means how much you are willing to pay for each individual click. As long as you are still figuring out which message will drive the most traffic, it is probably worth not setting your bids too high. You don’t want to blow your whole budget in a day.

Check out the Twitter help centre for more detailed information on how Twitter Ads work.

Analyse the performance

So how do you know how your ads have performed? Well for one you can use your Google Analytics to see whether traffic to your site has increased and if you are an E-commerce site you can look at your sales numbers, but if you want to know exactly how one ad has performed compared to another one, both Facebook and Twitter has excellent tools, that shows you just how many impressions and clicks each ad produced.

If you want an overview of all of your different options when it comes to Social Media Advertising, check out this article from Hootsuite, which takes you through the different channels and how they work.

Enjoy – and happy advertising!

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