Advertising On Social Media: A Guide

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What Is Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience with the objective to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic.

According to Oberlo, approximately 48% of the global population use social media, and the number is ever-growing.

Therefore, social media allows brands access to cost-effective advertising by enabling them to interact with a large audience.

Social Media Advertising Key Takeaways

• Focus on building a strong social media presence
• Know your audience
• Establish a tone of voice that your target audience can recognize instantly
• Social media engagement is the key secret for successful campaigns
• Social media marketing is not a quick fix! Focus on building solid relationships with your audience

Understanding How social Media Advertising Works

Firstly, social media advertisers focus on establishing a strong social media presence over major social media platforms.

Once there is a good social media following, the advertisers create shareable content and advertorials focused on:

• Promoting products or services on social media platforms
• Increasing brand awareness on social media platforms.

If done right, social media advertising attracts a huge conversion and sales, while the overall costs are low compared to traditional advertising.

Various social media platforms are available to you. Some may be more critical for your marketing efforts than others.

Popular social media advertising include:

• Facebook Advertising
• Instagram Advertising
• Twitter Advertising
• Pinterest Advertising
• LinkedIn Advertising
• TikTok Advertising
• YouTube Advertising
• WeChat Advertising
• Tumblr Advertising
• Reddit Advertising
• SnapChat Advertising
• Quora Advertising

It's important to first define your goal/objective so that you don't waste time and money on the wrong platform:

Here are some different questions to ask yourself as it relates to your goals:

• Do I want to simply drive brand awareness?
• Do I want to drive users to my website to gather information?
• Do I want to increase sales and get my customer to take action?

From there, choose the platform that targets your audience best and start experimenting!

Social Media Marketing Examples Done Right

Here are examples of successful social media campaigns you would want to copy:

1. Dollar Shave Club Advert That Achieved 1.5X Increase In Subscriptions

Dollar Shave Club is known for clever ad campaigns that feature very straightforward messaging. For instance, this was a high-performing Facebook advert that saw the subscription list grow up to 1.6 billion subscribers.

Dollar shave club has done a perfect job of showcasing its value proposition in the advert, which is the key reason for increased subscription numbers.

2. Ipsy

Ipsy is a beauty products dealer with over 3.1 Million Instagram followers.

The brand runs successful activations on Instagram, encouraging the users to post with their hashtags to be featured on Instagram stories.

embed:instagram

Ipsy gives us a good example of how to ensure diversity in terms of social media content. The brand uses user-generated content to drive successful social media campaigns.

Best Practices For Social Media Advertising

• Produce content and share it on social media
• Selectively promote your top content on social media
• Build your remarketing audience by tagging site visitors with a cookie
• Apply behavioral and demographics filters on your social media audience
  
• Remarket to your audience with display ads, social ads, and remarketing lists for search ads
• Use tools to monitor social media engagement (see best social media monitoring tools below )
• Capture qualified leads and sell

Best Social Media Monitoring Tools

For effective social media advertising, you need to monitor engagement. These tools provide the best capabilities when it comes to social media monitoring

1. Hootsuite Enables you to manage multiple networks and profiles and measure your campaign
2. Talkwalker: Monitor social, reviews, blogs, forums, news sites & more on all markets in 198 languages.
3. Mentionlytics: Provides intelligent social media monitoring
4. Synthesio: AI-enabled social helps you to identify and understand social media users' ever-changing motivations, preferences, and attitudes.
5. Reputology: Review monitoring and management platform that helps businesses monitor, respond to, and analyze their online reviews

Hootsuite

Manage and schedule posts to multiple social media profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and more.

• Pricing: Freemium
• Twitter: @hootsuite
• Website: https://hootsuite.com/

Businesses using Hootsuite:

88 successful businesses are using Hootsuite ➜

Get Hootsuite ➜

Talkwalker

Social media monitoring tool

• Pricing: Paid
• Twitter: @https://twitter.com/talkwalker
• Website: www.talkwalker.com

Businesses using Talkwalker:

1 successful business is using Talkwalker ➜

Get Talkwalker ➜

Mentionlytics

AI-enabled social media monitoring tool

• Pricing: Paid
• Twitter: @https://instagram.com/mentionlytics
• Website: mentionlytics.com

Get Mentionlytics ➜

Synthesio

AI-enabled tool for monitoring the online voice of your consumers, helping you to identify and understand their ever-changing motivations, preferences, and attitudes.

• Pricing: Paid
• Twitter: @https://www.twitter.com/Synthesio
• Website: www.synthesio.com

Get Synthesio ➜

Reputology

• Pricing: Paid
• Website: www.reputology.com

Get Reputology ➜

Contributors

Contributors to this article:

• Pat Walls, Founder @ Starter Story
• David Gitonga, Writer @ Starter Story

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