fbpx

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing Blog ImageReading Time: 4 minutes

Social media marketing has become one of the best ways to attract, inform and engage with potential customers and clients and in today’s article we are going to be looking at some of the most popular platforms and the tools available to use when marketing on these websites.

Firstly we are going to take a look at Facebook and the ways in which you can advertise on this platform. In it’s most basic form, you can simply boost a post and apply very simply segmentation setting for your target audience such as age and location. If however you want to improve your ads results and achieve a better ROI then it is advised to use Facebook’s Ads Manager. This allows you to utilise more of Facebooks Ads manager features. To do this it is well advised to created a business manager account within Facebooks Ad Manager – this will allow you use more of the features shown below:

Detailed Targeting – You can create custom and lookalike audiences based on various setting and data and this feature is particularly good if you use social media advertising for e-commerce purposes.

Ad Schedules – For most advertisers, you don’t want your ads running for 24 hours a day, so it is well advised to run your ads when you target audiences and customers are awake and online. If you apply a lifetime or monthly budget to a Facebook Ad, you can also set schedules for when you want you ad to run.

Catalogues – If you sell physical products online and want to remarket them to previous website visitors, then you can upload your product inventory to Facebooks Business Manager. From experience, we have found that remarking ads offer a good ROI, generally at a cheaper CPC compared to other forms of paid search.

Before starting to run these ads, ensure that you have installed the below piece of code into your website:

Facebook Pixel – this is a small piece of code that gets inserted in the header of your website and allows you to track and monitor your ads and how they perform. It is very much advised to insert this before you begin running ads, so that you can measure how well your ads are performing.

This short video by Neil Patel offers some useful hints and tips on advertising on Facebook.

As many of us know Instagram is owned by Facebook and when we create and manage ads for our clients we can also choose to deliver these ads on Instagram, as well as other market places owned by Facebook. Depending on your target audiences, budget and product or service these ads can also offer a good ROI for advertisers. This is especially true for clothing and fashion industry businesses.

If you are specifically a B2B seller or service provider then LinkedIn is a great place to share your content, thoughts and/or company updates. LinkedIn is the only social media business platform that essentially allows you to choose your own audience. What is meant by this is that it is you who decides who you choose to connect with. So any content or posts you make only goes out to people who you have agreed to connect with.

LinkedIn also offer paid advertising services and these, similar in a way to Facebook’s ads offer a number of ways in which to target you customers/clients. This can include:

Boost Company Updates – you can choose to boost your company’s post and updates so that specific, chosen audiences see your updates and latest company news.

LinkedIn Mail Box – Using LinkedIn InMail you can send direct mail to your chosen audience and this feature allows you to measure and monitor open rates and engagement. This is particularly useful if you are looking to speak directly with decision makers in certain companies.

Lead Generation Forms – Ads can be placed in people feeds and when they click on your ad their profile data automatically populates the lead generation form, making it quick and easy to gather contact information for potential new customers and clients.

Twitter also offer paid advertising services and although not as popular as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn it is still a platform that attracts millions os users daily. Twitter offer a number of different adverting options and this includes:

Promoted Accounts – essentially this form of advertising is about brand awareness and growing your following on their platform.

Promoted Tweets – similar in a way to Facebook’s ‘boost post’ option, this option simply allows your tweet to be seen by more people, thus potentially helping you reach new audiences with deals, offers or even to just build your brand awareness.

There is a good article here from Neil Patel who shares some insights and ideas on how to create a paid adverting account on Twitter.

Conclusion

Social Media Management and advertising has grown at a vast rate in the past few years and this trend doesn’t seem to be stopping. There are a number of surveys out there now that suggest that many companies are spending more on Facebook and Instagram ads than they are on their Google Ads search engine ads. In my opinion, I think it is important to utilise social media, however, you need to understand your target audience and how they use both search engines and what social media platforms do they spend the most time on.

This will help you to identify where to invest your marketing budget and if delivered correctly will give you the best possible ROI. For more information on creating a social media marketing strategy, please do check out some of our other blogs and articles.

As always, if you have any thought, ideas or suggestions then please do leave a comment in the box below.

PS: It is also worth remembering that your social media signals are rumored to play a significant factor in your organic SEO ranking, so a good social media presence that interacts with users has real SEO benefits as well.

 

Call Now Button