So you’ve got someone in charge of your social channels. You’ve started to see some results. You now want to find new ways to gain leads through social, increase your followers, drive events – you decide it’s time to implement paid social advertising.
At Marketing Cube, we have decided to do just that. We have a firm grip on our social wheel, and we are driving down a road that promises plenty of upside but still contains the unknown.
By reading this blog, you can join our journey as we experience the paid advertising world first-hand. Learn from our analytics, the positive steps, the occasional misjudgements, and hopefully by the end you will have enough insight to enhance your own social strategy.
Out of the box, we know that paid advertising on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn provides the benefits of:
- Interactions with your brand
- Developing a greater following
- Increasing your reach
With that in mind, we will examine the benefits, expectations and costs involved across all three social giants.
Right to the point, when advertising on Facebook, there are two options you can take:
Setting a daily budget or implementing a lifetime budget.
Facebook operates on a bidding system; you compete with others trying to promote to a similar audience.
Facebook will choose the lowest bid that gets your ad seen at its optimal level. A daily budget will mean the bids will never exceed what you set e.g. $10 max daily. With lifetime budgets the bids will go daily over the entirety of the campaign e.g. $50 over 5 days, the bids will attempt to max out at $10 per day, if you don’t reach the $10 per day then Facebook will increase the ad strength over the next few days to make up for it
The size of the audience you are trying to reach will determine how much you will spend on your ads. $1 a day – that’s your minimum cost.
You can target audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviours or connections.
Facebook lets you further target your campaigns based on the type of ‘pull factor’ you envision for your ad. For example, we want to try to build our audience to attend our regular Meetup. Using Eloqua, we create landing pages with built-in forms that register their details.
Facebook ads are built on costs-per-click (how many times people click on your ad) compared to costs per impression (cost based on every 1000 impressions)
As a general guide – if trying to promote your posts then cost-per-click is the way to go. If you\’re just trying to raise awareness of your page then head down the impression track. Facebook allows you to build custom audiences, so you can start to target the people you want and off the back of that use look-alike audiences to complete some A/B testing.
With Twitter you have the option of running 5 different campaigns. Each campaign operates on an auction model similar to Facebook’s.
- Grow followers – will appear in the ‘who to follow’ section of your Twitter account (top right of the Twitter
With this type of ad, you’re only paying on a cost-to-follow basis e.g. $1 every time you gain a follower. You determine how much you want to spend daily or over the campaign, and Twitter will bid accordingly – so how much is one follower worth to you?!
- Website clicks or visitors – creating a website card that appears in the timeline of the Twitter user
This card measures the number of clicks your promotion page attains. Costs are calculated if someone clicks on your card.
You can implement a conversion tracking tool. This is used in the back end to understand the engagements taking place. All you need to do is embed the code, which Twitter provides, into the website that you are trying to attract people to.
- Tweet engagement – ads which display as a ‘promoted tweet\’ campaign
The purpose of a tweet engagement ad is to provide your most valuable content at a time when you think is most favourable. This allows you to target your premium audience. Costs are fairly high with these as you’re paying for each engagement e.g. when someone retweets, favourites, expands, clicks on, replies to, or follows you.
- App Install – website cards that invite installation of an app
These cards invite the user to install the app directly from their mobile device, or from the tweet itself. Costs, like website cards, are determined by whether someone clicks the ad.
- Lead on Twitter – promoted ads which offer an incentive in order to gain your email address
Here, for example, we might offer specific white papers on marketing automation as long as you provide your name and email. The result is that this information feeds back into our Eloqua account and we gain a new contact or update profiler. Yes. Eloqua is one of the partners that Twitter allows to sync with your Twitter accounts. I’m sure you can work this one out by now…but the costs are only when someone submits their information on the ad.
First things first. With LinkedIn, the ideal target audience is B2B. It\’s a website built for the working professional which means your ads are targeting a specific demographic.
From what I have seen, LinkedIn is also the most expensive to run a campaign. There is a minimum spend of $10/day – this means with the bidding system in place, you will be paying high costs for engagement. Your targets should therefore be long-term and high-value to your business.
LinkedIn ad audiences can be targeted through their job title, job function, industry, geography, age, gender, company name, company size, or LinkedIn Group.
Costs associated for placing ads are worked on cost-per-click or cost per 1000 impression. LinkedIn will provide their recommended bidding range based off what your competitors are doing.
Linked Ads will be shown on:
- Profile Page (when users view the profile of other LinkedIn members)
- Home Page (the page that users see when they log in to LinkedIn)
- Inbox (the page where users see messages and invitations to connect)
- Search Results Page (the page that results when you search for a member by name)
- Groups (on pages in LinkedIn Groups)
Some Quick Tips
Wordstream has put together a few ideas to help you out. I’ve summarised a few below:
- Use a professional or stock photo. The investment will be worth it
- Provide a great reason for someone to engage with the ad. What is of value to the reader?
- Know your target audience before you create the ad
- Avoid colours that are the same as the social site
- Keep your ads fresh
Good luck with your ad campaigns and we’ll keep you updated on our progress!
