When you have a clear goal for your business, you need to make a plan and stick to it, right? Well, that’s technically true, but many business owners usually treat social media advertising as a single, unified step instead of a series of commitments and tracking of results. What to do then?
There really is no doubt about the effectiveness of social media advertising anymore, but you might still be hesitant to jump into one and pouring your budget expecting to see results and getting an underwhelming response instead. Well, that’s because different platforms are better suited for different businesses and goals. If you have a small business, being everywhere on the internet is neither effective nor practical. Let us show you how to be where it matters depending on what you want.
Yeah, what a surprise, right? Well, its inclusion might be a little predictable, but you can’t argue with Facebook’s numbers. Over 1 billion people are daily users, making it the most widely used social media site out there. That means that, whatever your goals are for your campaign, such as brand awareness, creating web traffic, generating leads, or many others like that, you’re likely to get good results with Facebook.
“But not everything depends on how big the audience is”, you might be thinking, and you’re right. Thankfully, Facebook’s advertising platforms is the most developed out of all major social media sites, as it has the power to target a very specific audience for each ad you put out. Unless you have a marketing budget of zero dollars or your business is alcohol or tobacco related (“adult”-themed in general), there’s no reason not to get on Facebook.
Facebook Messenger
If you’re more interested in lead generation but want to keep accessing Facebook’s very convenient targeting system, then Facebook Messenger is the platform for you. When you develop a campaign specifically for this platform and someone clicks one of your ads, a prompt will give them the option to message your business page, from which you can follow up on them directly later on.
The photo and video sharing app allow brands to create their own business profile, which has plenty of useful analytics from both your profile and each post you make, and the ability to use third party tools to make your job easier. This comes as no surprise since Instagram is owned by Facebook, which means that the same rich user database is available here as well, with the added benefit that organic growth is a plausible alternative to paid advertising. If your business is small and your marketing budget limited, this makes Instagram a valuable ally in the digital marketing game.
So far we’ve seen the best options available for a B2C business, but what if yours follows a B2B model? If that’s the case, LinkedIn might be the best way to spend your advertising budget because of the tools at your disposal. Made for business leaders and professionals to find and interact with each other, users build their profiles around employers, job positions, company emails, and other such information they would rather not make available in a platform like Facebook. Because of this, LinkedIn allows for a better level of business conversions and opportunities for networking within your industry.
It’s not that Twitter is an ineffective tool for advertising your business, as just having a presence in that platform gives you more legitimacy. It’s just that you need a very sizable following to really cut through all the static generated by the constant tweeting from the people around you. Where Twitter really shines is in its potential as a customer service platform. Don’t believe us? More than 80% of social media customer service requests come from Twitter users, according to their advertisers. The amount of simultaneous conversations you can have there makes it the new 1-800 number of the internet age. Also, the healthy use of hashtags lets you search for people who are looking precisely for what you’re selling, so an organic, non-paid use is technically plausible on Twitter.
Nowadays, managing only one social media profile for your business closes many doors that you may not even realize are there. Now that you know which platforms are better for your brand to be in, how about getting some help setting them up and working at full capacity for you? There are many ways to do so, but getting a professional team to help you will ensure you get the best results for your money, especially if you don’t really know what is social media advertising or how it works.
