Advertising On Social Media: A Guide

Social Media Advertising

Social Media (Organic)

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Updated: April 14th, 2025

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.

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

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:

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!

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

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.

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

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

Hootsuite Enables you to manage multiple networks and profiles and measure your campaign
Talkwalker: Monitor social, reviews, blogs, forums, news sites & more on all markets in 198 languages.
Mentionlytics: Provides intelligent social media monitoring
Synthesio: AI-enabled social helps you to identify and understand social media users' ever-changing motivations, preferences, and attitudes.
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.

Free for 30 days
Professional: $49/month
Team: $129/month
Business: $739/month
Pricing: Paid
Twitter: @hootsuite
Website: hootsuite.com

Businesses using Hootsuite:

96 successful businesses are using Hootsuite ➜

Get Hootsuite ➜

Talkwalker

Social media monitoring tool

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

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: synthesio.com

Get Synthesio ➜

Reputology

Pricing: Paid
Website: reputology.com

Get Reputology ➜

Social Media Advertising is one of the leading ways to get the word out when it comes to .

There are various different Social Media platforms available to you. Some may be more critical for your marketing efforts than others, however, it's important to have an understanding of what's out there and available to you.

Let's talk about a few of the main platforms and what makes them unique:

Facebook Advertising - more than 2 billion monthly users. Facebook is the best for lead generation + capturing email addresses for e-commerce businesses.
Instagram Advertising - approximately 500 million monthly users and has a higher audience engagement rate than any other platform. Instagram ads are best for linking to a product page or landing page and reaches the 18-29 age group most effectively.
Twitter Advertising- Small businesses typically use twitter ads to drive brand awareness, but the platform is meant more for organic engagement (and is not as heavily used for paid advertising)
Pinterest Advertising - 175 million monthly users and most effectively reaches the female audience. Pinterest is great for promoting products without "promoted". The promoted pins have a way of blending right in.
LinkedIn Advertising - 227 million monthly users and is geared towards the B2B market and generates the highest quality leads. Great platform for recruiters, high-end products and services that will help businesses

It's important to first define your goal/objective so that you don't waste time and money into 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!

Learn more about social media advertising ➜ here.

Case Study

Founder Andy Hayes talks about mastering FB ads and the pixel:

The biggest bang for your buck will likely be mastering Facebook and it’s platform - which we all know is pay for play, so you’ll have to come up with a small amount of budget to start for marketing.

We’ve spent countless hours (and paid numerous coaches) before we cracked the code that works for us on Facebook, but it is working really well for us now.

Some of the most important things to know when it comes to FB Ads:

Start with retargeting (that’s showing ads to people who already know you but did not purchase). Master this - and start building information on your Facebook Pixel - before you do anything else
Once you have that down, try working with the 1% “Lookalike” audience to prospect for new customers. This may take awhile because your pixel audience is small, so try layering on interests - 1% Lookalike and your largest competitor, for example. Don’t use interest-only targeting until you master this.
Great photography and videography is key, as is smart copy. Research what’s out there in your industry and constantly test - what works for one company may not work for other people.
Make sure you have good offers. For example, we have a $5 trial for our subscription, which converts affordably - if we promoted our subscription with the standard $30 front charge, it wouldn’t be as cost-effective.

Andy Hayes, on starting Plum Deluxe Tea ($75,000/month) full story ➜

meet the author

Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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What Is Social Media Advertising?

Social Media Advertising Key Takeaways

Understanding How social Media Advertising Works

Social Media Marketing Examples Done Right

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