The Importance of Social Advertising

Throughout 2014 we noticed several changes in the social media playground: There was a large drop in organic reach, less overly- promotional content within the newsfeed, the loss of Facebook’s like-gate, and, also, updates within multiple of the social media advertising platforms. The changes in algorithm updates point to one thing: Social advertising. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn continue to optimize their advertising product while other social networks, including Instagram and Pinterest, are slowly opening their doors to the ad market.

When you look at the historic changes of organic reach, it keeps dropping. This means in you will have to put some of your dollars into social media advertising to reach your consumers. Paying for space on social media is becoming a new norm.

• When you have a special offer to promote, boost your post.
• If you have an awesome video that captures the essence of your brand, consider YouTube ads.
• If you simply want to let the world know you exist, promote your social media profiles to a specifically designed audience.

If you are hesitant to believe your customer is using social media- think again. Multi-platform use by adults has now increased to 52 percent, according to Pew Research Center. As Facebook still remains the home base for many internet users, platforms such as Instagram and Twitter have seen a rapid increase in user growth. Smart Insights reported global digital internet usage now accounts for 57 percent of daily media time and, on average, 5.6 hours of consumers media consumption is digital. When consumers are spending nearly a quarter of their day online, what is the most logical advertising solution? Digital.

Benefits of Running Ads on Social

When you run an ad on social media– and really any online ad platform– you can expect to see a solid reach, in-depth analytics and targeting options, and better performance.

Target Audience Options

The ability to target consumers beyond their basic demographic information on social media is here and the ways to target consumers keeps expanding. A couple of years ago the most you could target a person on social media would have been based on their gender, relationship status, age, education and employment. Today the social advertising targeting options can get as narrow as your political party affiliation to whether you are a fine arts collector. Most social media platforms have either partnered up with or acquired data companies to pull this information from.

Performance

A good social media strategy has an overarching goal above all else, engagement. If a business constantly pushes out blatant and forceful ads they will lose not only the attention of their consumer, but the connection with them as well. The majority of the social media platforms have a priority to keep their users happy with the experience. Facebook doesn’t allow more than 20 percent of text to be in their advertisements and platforms new to social advertising, Instagram and Pinterest, are very protective of the type of ads being served to their consumers.

In-Depth Analytics

When you place a social advertisement, just like with any other types of digital ads, you will want to look back at the performance of the ads and optimize for better performance. Within the social platform you can easily access the CTR, CPC, CPM, unique impressions, frequency, engagement rate and the other plethora of data available. If you go a step further and set up your analytics platform to collect data from the social advertisements you can even better measure how the consumer followed through on your website.

This year we will see an increase in social media advertising. Businesses will not only need to educate themselves on how to properly use social media to reach consumers, but they will need to understand the importance of investing in social media. If there are two key things we can take from 2014: We can’t rely on organic search traffic and more value will be put into social advertising.