The Impact of Social Media

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn:

• How to use social media advertising as part of your complete paid, earned and owned strategy.
• How to create and place effective social media ads for a number of platforms.
• How to use the available targeting options to reach consumers at the right time and in the right place.
• How to approach measuring the effectiveness of social media advertising.

Source: Rob Stokes, https://biz.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Marketing/Book%3A_eMarketing__The_Essential_Guide_to_Marketing_in_a_Digital_World_(Stokes)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Introduction

Social media first became a choice for marketers back in 2005, when Facebook launched its first advertising option. The medium has advanced in leaps and bounds since then, offering a reasonably low cost ad option to marketers, as well as the opportunity to reach a wide audience for little money as long as the ads are engaging enough.

Social media ads can be recognised by labels such as 'suggested post', 'promoted pin' and so on, depending on the platform. The ad formats available are continuously evolving, which means that marketers need to keep up with what’s available to them, and that there are ever-increasing opportunities to reach your consumers on a platform and in a format that suits them.

Key terms and concepts

Understanding social media advertising

Social media advertising should be considered as part of an overall social media effort. While brands can start a Facebook page and share engaging posts, those posts would be seen only by a fraction of the possible audience. Even if they have already liked your page. Paying to promote your posts is necessary to ensure that you reach a much larger percentage of your target audience.

Social media advertising is a form of online advertising that takes place on social media networks. Many platforms offer extraordinarily detailed targeting options that match users whom advertisers have identified as belonging to specific purchasing groups, making it a great way to reach exactly the right group of users with your ads.

While more traditional forms of advertising are arguably somewhat inefficient, the targeting offered by social media platforms make it stand out even from other forms of online advertising, such as search or display ads. Social also tends to have higher clickthrough and engagement rates at a lower cost (Hootsuite, 2015).

While it is possible to use social media advertising without considering any other aspect of your digital marketing strategy, it should be considered holistically. The Social media strategy chapter discusses how social media in general can fit into other channels. Social media advertising can be used to:

• Draw attention to products and drive sales
• Drive traffic to websites and other online properties
• Encourage foot traffic
• Encourage other activities offline.

Used well, given the targeting options and access to consumers it offers, social media should be an essential part of any paid media campaign.

Core principles

Social media consists of a vast number of different platforms, most of which have different rules for what will and will not work well as an advertisement. However, there are some general principles that govern social media advertising as a whole.

General guidelines

First, remember that 80% of social media time takes place on mobile devices (comScore, 2016). This means that any ad you create for social media is highly likely to be viewed on mobile so you need to make sure that it will look good on that device. Test your posts on mobile devices before you pay to promote them. Consider:

• Images should be clear and convey meaning even when small.
• Text should be brief enough to minimise the need for scrolling.
• The point of the ad should come across immediately with a clear CTA.
• Any links in the ad should lead to mobile-optimised landing pages.

Second, most content on social media is user-generated so if you're creating paid ads, you need to match the rules of the platform you're on and generate content that fits what users of that platform will expect. Make sure you understand the platform before you start advertising on it.

Example 13.4.1

As an example of matching content to platform, take a look at Denny's, an American restaurant chain, on Tumblr.

Figure 13.4.1: Denny's Tumblr account matches the light, quirky tone preferred by Tumblr users Adapted From Content Marketing Institute, 2016

Compare their tone on Tumblr to their tone on Facebook, which, while still informal and friendly, is much more in line with the slightly more professional feel expected by users of that platform.

Figure 13.4.2: Denny's Facebook posts, note how good these would look on mobile! Adapted From Screenshot, Facebook, 2017

Similarly, compare Wendy's, an American fast-food chain, tone on Twitter to their tone on Facebook.

Figure 13.4.3: Wendy's tone responding to customers on Twitter compared to Facebook Adapted From Screenshots, Facebook and Twitter, 2017

While promoted ads aren't the same thing as responding to customers, the same principle applies: fit your tone and content to the platform. On Facebook, because reading the audience can be a little difficult, because their audience is so broad, a more neutral, but still brand-relevant, tone is best. On other platforms, because you can see more about the users you are speaking to, it can be easier to adapt your tone to them. Remember, though, that your tone should also be informed by your brand identity and overarching strategy.

Third, use your regular, unpaid posts to test out your paid ads. Make sure that you use effective social media copy in every post. Keep your copy short and to the point, with a clear call to action that tells the reader exactly what to do next, and give them a reason to click or carry out the CTA. Then, track which posts are being liked, shared, or commented on, those should be your first choice for paid promotion. The feedback you get on posts is often near-instantaneous, so this will allow you to respond quickly to whichever posts are doing well and which are doing badly. Facebook Ads Manager can help you do A/B testing by putting equal funds behind two different posts. The one that gets a better initial response gets the rest of the funds.

Fourth, rotate ads often. Social media users expect fresh content; they should not be seeing the same ad multiple times over multiple days, so rotate ads every three to five days (Hootsuite, 2016a). The general rule is that a user should see an ad a maximum of four times.

Payment models

You should be familiar with the various payment models available from the Online advertising chapter.

The most likely payment models you will encounter on social media include:

• CPC (Cost per click, pay only when the ad is clicked on)

• CPE (Cost per engagement, pay only for demonstrated engagement with the ad)

Note

You can learn more about Facebook's oCPM bidding here: blog. adstage.io/2014/06/16/ learn-about-facebookocpm-bidding.

• CPM (Cost per thousand impressions)
• oCPM (Optimised cost per mille, Facebook's flexible ad bid type, where bids can be adjusted based on the goals the advertiser hopes to achieve).
  

Other payment models will be encountered on other platforms, for example, Pinterest uses an auction bid model for its CPM. Users set a maximum price, but are only charged the amount needed to top the second-highest bidder. They are then charged per thousand views. As another example, a lot of specialised paid media on Twitter is done via third parties like Ad Dynamo and can require high budgets and one-off costs rather than being cost per view or engagement.

Platforms

One of the core principles to keep in mind when choosing a social media platform on which to advertise is that you need to go where your audience is. Be sure to choose a platform that fits your needs as a business as well. Let's take a look at a few of the most popular platforms to see what they can offer and why you might want to focus your attention on them. Note that the demographic statistics given are for the US. As you read, keep in mind that for most networks, the number of older users is increasing which can lead to changes in the behaviour of younger users on the platform or even drive them off entirely.

Facebook

What they offer: Facebook offers a wide array of targeting options and the biggest social media audience in the world, with 1.79 billion users as of the third quarter of 2016 (Statista, 2016). Ad formats are based on desired objectives (which we will discuss in the next section). Their pricing can vary significantly based on a number of factors, but their ad platform is fairly intuitive, and Facebook Analytics gives you a lot of information you can use to optimise ad performance.

You will have access to Facebook Ads Manager, which allows you to manage campaigns, ad sets, and individual ads. This is also available as an app.

Who uses it: 83% of female-identified and 75% of male-identified Internet users use Facebook. The demographics are skewed toward the youth market, with 88% of 18 to 29-year-olds, 84% of 30 to 49-year-olds, and 62% of online users aged 65 and up using the platform 82% of users have some form of higher education (Sprout Social, 2017).

Figure 13.4.4: Facebook user demographics Adapted From Sprout social, 2017

Best suited to: Every business should have a Facebook page, as it is the bare minimum of what users expect. Your business should be on Facebook even if it is just listed with an address, website, and other basic details. Whether a business should use paid advertising to promote posts depends on what it wants to achieve, but if you plan to use social media advertising at all, you should consider starting on Facebook.

Instagram

What they offer: Instagram offers photo, video and carousel ads in a number of formats. Because it is owned by Facebook, it has many of the same features, including analytics (through Facebook Ads Manager), good targeting options, and various objectives to drive campaigns. Instagram stories is also a powerful feature, which is mentioned in the Social media platforms chapter. Finally, Instagram is potentially the best platform at the moment to work with influencers. It has a very tight community culture with a focus on quality, unique content and creativity.

Who uses it: More women use Instagram than men, and more people in urban areas use it than in rural areas. Income is split fairly evenly among various income brackets, with 38% of users earning more than US $75 000 annually active on the platform. The important thing to note for Instagram is age, 59% of users between 18 and 29 use Instagram, compared to only 8% above 65 (Sprout Social, 2017).

Figure 13.4.5: Instagram user demographics Adapted From Sprout social, 2017

Best suited to: In theory, any business can use Instagram. The key attraction for Instagram is visually attractive pictures and videos, so businesses that lend themselves to visuals like this, such as food, decoration, or travel-related brands, will have an advantage, but any business that wants to capture that all-important 18−24 year-old demographic should be active here.

Twitter

What they offer: Twitter offers ad campaigns based on objectives, much like Facebook and Instagram, and the kind of targeting you would expect from a major social media platform. Many marketers point out that advertising on Twitter is a problem because the ads are expensive, the targeting is not as good as Facebook's, and user growth has stalled, but pay-per-click (PPC) on Twitter can be cheaper than other options.

Followers earned from a Twitter campaign tend to be fairly qualified prospects. They will have been chosen to see your tweets based on how well they fit your targeting profile, and they then choose to follow you based on how well your tweet speaks to their needs.

Who uses it: Twitters users are also skewed towards the youth market, 36% of adults aged 18 to 29, but only 10% of adults over 65, use it. And there is an equal percentage of men and women active on the platform. For location, 77% of Twitter accounts are from outside the US, with a fairly even distribution across urban, suburban and rural areas. Like Facebook, college graduates make up the largest audience for Twitter, 54% have some tertiary education or have graduated college. The income demographics are very similar to Instagram, with 30% of adults who earn more than US $75 000 a year using Twitter (Sprout Social, 2017).

Figure 13.4.6: Twitter user demographics Adapted From Sprout social, 2017

Best suited to: Any business that wants to reach an audience like the one described. Twitter audiences are used to instant gratification, Twitter feuds (check out the hashtag #cuteanimaltweetoff for a good example of this), and snappy comebacks. Twitter is a highly politicised space, so any slip-ups or faux pas on the part of your brand will be quickly picked up.

LinkedIn

What they offer: Most social media sites offer good targeting options, but in keeping with its position as a social network for business professionals, LinkedIn's targeting options involve someone's professional abilities. It also tends to convert well on gated content that requires users to enter an email address or other information to download something.

Who uses it: Until 2017, LinkedIn was one of the few social networks that didn't skew toward 18−29 year olds, however this shifted in 2017.

Figure 13.4.7: LinkedIn user demographics Adapted From Sprout social, 2017

LinkedIn is used by:

• 34% of adults 18−29
• 33% of adults 30−49
• 24% of adults 50−64
• 21% of adults over 65.
  

More men than women use LinkedIn, 31% to 27%. On the LinkedIn press page, you can see a map of all their users.

Figure 13.4.8: LinkedIn's user locations Adapted From Sprout social, 2017

LinkedIn is even more focused on users with some tertiary experience, 50% of adult college graduates and 27% of adults with some college experience use it. Higher levels of users are high earners, with 45% of adults making over US $75 000 using the platform (Sprout Social, 2017).

Best suited to: B2B marketers who want to target business professionals should start with LinkedIn, and companies that hire a lot of people.

Pinterest

What they offer: Pinterest doesn't offer as many targeting options as some other social media platforms, but it still has basic location, device, gender, and language targeting. Users often visit Pinterest specifically to gather information about and plan potential purchases, and those who view ads on Pinterest tend to have greater awareness and purchase intent than those who do not.

Who uses it: Pinterest is a great platform for targeting women. 45% of women use it, while only 17% of men do. It is again skewed toward the younger market, with 36% of adults 18−29 using it, dropping steadily as age increases. Only 16% of adults aged 65+ use the platform. Pinterest is most popular in suburban areas, 34% of people living in suburban areas use it, while 30% of urban users are active. Like many social media platforms, its users tend to have at least some tertiary education (Sprout Social, 2017).

Figure 13.4.9: Pinterest user demographics Adapted From Sprout social, 2017

Best suited to: Retailers tend to make the most use of this platform, though other businesses can create successful accounts as well. The key is to create beautiful, useful boards that people want to look at, and use advertising to capitalise on that.

Snapchat

What they offer: Snapchat is one of the newer major social networks, but it has come a long way since its origin as a niche platform mostly used by teenagers. It still has a lot of pull with young demographics, and it encourages real-time content creation and consumption, with users paying more attention to content. Most video snaps are watched with audio on, which differs greatly from Facebook, and Snapchat has an engagement rate five times higher than the average clickthrough rate for other platforms (Wallaroo Media, 2017). Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have been fairly blatant about stealing Snapchat's features, including Stories and Filters, which could mean a drop-off in users over time. However, Snapchat is fighting back with new offerings such as Lenses.

Who uses it: Snapchat is dominated by younger users, with 60% of users under 25. About 23% of users haven't yet graduated from high school. Only about 12% of users are aged 35 to 54, with a mere 2% of users aged 65+. However, this is changing, more than half of new users signing up to Snapchat are over 25. Snapchat doesn't publish gender information for its users, but in 2013, about 70% of users were women, and a survey from 2015 showed that more women than men use the platform (Hootsuite, 2016b). The highest penetration rate for Snapchat is in Ireland, then Saudi Arabia and Sweden. College students are more likely to have Snapchat accounts than other demographic groups.

Figure 13.4.10: Some Snapchat user statistics Adapted From Mediakix, 2016

Best suited to: Snapchat has fewer options for small businesses than most other social media platforms simply because their options are expensive. Prices have come down, however, with cheapest option, the Sponsored Local Geofilters ad, coming in at as little as US $5. This means that, while the bigger options are still only available to big businesses, other options are available to almost anyone. This means that Snapchat is suited to any business that wants to find a particularly young audience.

Yelp

What they offer: Yelp is a review site that helps users select a business that suits their needs. There are many sites similar to Yelp, so keep in mind that you may want to choose a different option that is more active in your area. Tracking leads generated by Yelp can be difficult, but it does provide some metrics like page views and ad clicks. With users relying more and more on reviews and review sites when choosing where to buy, platforms like Yelp are increasingly attractive.

Who uses it: Men use Yelp more than women, and women are 50% less likely to leave a review if they use the site regularly. People in urban areas are twice as likely as those in rural or suburban areas to use Yelp to choose a business. Yelp users are active on mobile, with 71% of searches on the platform originating from mobile devices worldwide. The largest age demographic for Yelp users is 18−34, which accounts for almost 42% of Yelp users. Most users, 60%, have at least some college education, and 38% of users have an annual household income of at least US $100 000 (Gaille, 2015).

Best suited to: Yelp works best for location-based businesses. That said, many advertisers argue that advertising on Yelp may not be worth the money compared to a free profile so weigh your options carefully.

Figure 13.4.11: Excerpt from "How Yelp Can Help", an infographic from Merchant Warehouse Adapted From Brandon [Gaille], 2015

Implementing social media advertising

Each platform has its own objectives, ad types, and targeting options. In this section, we will examine a few of the most popular ones.

Facebook

We have already looked at what kind of audience can be found on Facebook and the broad strokes of what they offer.

Objectives

Facebook offers several paid-for advertising solutions based on the action the advertiser wants the audience to take, the purpose of the ads. The core objectives are awareness, consideration, or conversions, which Facebook has broken down further into more specific objectives on which you can base your ad creation.

• Awareness

• Consideration

• Conversion

The ad format you choose will match your advertising objective.

Ad types

Once you have chosen an objective, Facebook offers a set number of ad formats to choose from that will help you meet that objective. Those formats are:

• Single image
• Single Video
• Carousel
• Slideshow (video-like ads)
• Dynamic ads
• Lead ads
• Boosted posts and promoted posts
• Collection
• Messenger ads
• Canvas (an ad type that offers different components in various configurations to tell a brand story).

Figure 13.5.1: Facebook ad examples for mobile and desktop feeds Adapted From Blue face media, 2017

These ads have several options for placement in your users' feed. They can appear RHS (right hand side) desktop, in the news feed on desktop, or in the news feed on mobile. Because Facebook owns Instagram, you also have the option of showing certain ad types there. The vast majority of Facebook's revenue comes from mobile, so they are very focused on a good mobile experience for their users. Find out more about their ads here: https://www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide You can also find a very useful infographic summarising the various options here: wersm.com/the-complete-guide-to-facebook-ad-specs/#prettyPhoto/0/.

Figure 13.5.2: Facebook ad placement options Adapted From Facebook, 2017

Targeting options

Once you have chosen an objective and ad type, you will need to look at Facebook's targeting options, which gathers user data from Instagram and WhatsApp as well. They offer three audience options to choose from:

Note

Facebook advertising information can be found at: www.facebook.com/ business/products/ads.

1. Core audiences, where you select your audience manually based on demographics like age and location.
2. Custom audiences, where you upload a contact list to connect with customers on Facebook.
3. Lookalike audiences, where you use customer information to find people similar to them on Facebook.

Figure 13.5.3: Facebook audience options Adapted From Facebook, 2017

Figure 13.5.4: A defined audience on Facebook Adapted From Screenshot, Facebook, 2017

Core audience (manual) selection allows many detailed targeting options:

1. Location: Where the users are located, city, region etc. Allows exclusion of locations.
2. Demographics: Age, gender, languages, relationships status, type of work, education, and more.
3. Interests: Interests, hobbies, and Pages they like on Facebook.
   
   
   
   Figure 13.5.5: Interests targeting on Facebook Adapted From Screenshot, Facebook, 2017
4. Behaviours: Activities users do on or off Facebook that give information on which device they use, their purchase behaviours or intent, travel preferences, and more.
5. Detailed targeting: Offers the option to include or exclude users who meet at least one parameter (not all of them). This can include whether people have a connection to you on Facebook (or have friends who do).
   

For a full list of Facebook targeting options, look at this infographic: i.marketingprofs. com/assets/images/daily-chirp/170213-infographic-complete-guide-to-facebookad-targeting-full.jpg

If you select multiple options from within an ad targeting category, you'll reach users who meet any of the options you've selected. For example, if you choose multiple Locations like the United States and Canada, you'll target anyone who lives in either the United States OR Canada, not both.

Another example might be choosing multiple options from the Interests targeting category. If you choose interests like Golf and Tennis, you'll target anyone who likes golf OR tennis, not just users who like both golf and tennis. Keep in mind that it's not possible to target ad sets only to the users who fall into all of the selected categories. Custom audience selection has several benefits, including:

•     Powerful exact targeting
•     No wastage
•     Cap bidding and frequency
•     Data is encrypted and secure.
  

Using these selectors, you can create a list of who you want to reach using their email addresses. Facebook matches the email addresses and allows exact targeting of those users through their ads. Custom audiences are extremely powerful; if you have users' email addresses, you can target individuals. This is useful for any brand that uses newsletters or gathers email addresses elsewhere.

Lookalike Audiences is useful because it helps you find a similar audience to your existing fans and gives more accurate targeting. This makes it easy to find more users on Facebook who are like the people you know. You can build a Lookalike Audience based on:

• People who like your Page
• Custom Audiences that you've created with emails, phone numbers, or website or app data.
  

It's an effective way to reach even more potential customers because you can target your Lookalike Audience with the adverts you create.

The Facebook Pixel

The Pixel is a piece of code you can build into your website to help you track user actions and remarket to them on Facebook. Your conversions can be tracked across mobile phones, tablets and desktops, you can optimise your bids for website conversions and ensure that your ads will be shown only to the users most likely to convert, and you can remarket to or reach users on Facebook who have visited your website. You can learn more about the pixel and get started with it here: www.facebook.com/business/a/facebook-pixel.

Facebook advertising tips

As you dip your toes into Facebook advertising, remember:

• Ads can be unpublished posts targeted at a specific audience.
• Multiple ads can run at the same time.
• Targeting should not be too granular, unless the audience is highly qualified.
• With awareness-based advertising, keep your reach and frequency as high as possible.
• Check your ads in Facebook's Ads Manager (or, for more advanced advertisers with multiple campaigns and ad sets, the Power Editor).
  

Note

Facebook will suggest a bid to help make sure that your ad will reach a significant portion of your audience.

Instagram

Instagram is a very large mobile platform with an engaged mobile audience, making it a good option for some businesses.

Note

You can do Facebook's own training course, Facebook Blueprint, for free to learn every aspect of its offering: www.facebook. com/blueprint

Objectives

Instagram offers three ad types driven by the objectives you want to achieve, which are not surprisingly, similar to Facebook ad objectives:

•     Brand awareness
•     Reach
•     Traffic
•     App installs
•     Engagement
•     Video views
•     Lead generation
•     Conversions
  

Ad types offered

Not every ad type is available for every objective. Once you choose an objective, you will be shown the ad types you can use. The three ad types offered by Instagram are:

1. Single image ads, which are exactly what they sound like.
2. Video ads, which can share videos up to 60 seconds long.
3. Carousel ads, which are similar to single image ads but include multiple images that users can swipe to see.
4. Slideshow ads, which are like Carousel ads, except the images scroll on their own with music creating a mini video.
5. Instagram Stories Ads, which include single image and single video ad formats that are placed within Instagram Stories (ShorterURLs, 2017).
   

Figure 13.5.6: A Carousel ad on Instagram Adapted From Adweek, 2017

Some companies can expand the types of Twitter advertising available, For example, Ad Dynamo (www.addynamo.com/new), which is focused on Africa, offers a range of ad types that are not available through self-service. Blue Robot (www.bluerobot. com/index.jsp#about) is another company that allows you to automate Twitter in a number of ways, such as automatically responding to Tweets with live data or building automated responses based on Tweets from various locations.

Targeting options

Instagram has many of the same targeting options as Facebook. They include:

• Custom audiences (target audiences of users you already know, which includes lookalike audiences)
• Location, age, gender, language targeting
• Detailed targeting (include or exclude users based on demographics, interests and/or behaviours)
• Connections (include or exclude users based on connections to your page, apps, or events).
  

You can also save an audience to use it for future ad sets.

Instagram advertising tips

• Remember, Instagram shares targeting options with Facebook so make use of them, but don't go too granular.
• Don't make your post look like an ad, it should be visually arresting and enjoyable first, advertising second. It should blend in with organic content rather than stand out as an ad.
• Include a hashtag so that users can find your posts/ads more easily. Bigger brands can create their own hashtags.
  

Note

You can find out more about advertising on Instagram at: https:// business.instagram. com/advertising or at blog. hootsuite.com/howto-use-instagram-forbusiness/

• Try to tell a brand story and think carefully about how details will affect what audiences take from your images.

Twitter

Twitter offers a self-service ad platform with several options and allows a degree of specific targeting. The service does still tend to change frequently, and not all options may be available to all regions or user accounts. Objectives Like Facebook, this is mobile first and the ad formats match the actions you want users to take. The basic objectives are:

1. Promote your brand
   
   • Website clicks or conversions
   • Increase followers
   • Awareness
   • Tweet engagements
2. Promote your video
   
   • Video views
3. Drive conversions
   
   • App installs or re-engagements.
     

Learn more about Twitter campaign types (which are slightly different from ad objectives) here: business.twitter.com/en/advertising/campaign-types.html

Ad types offered

• Plain text tweet are tweets that appear at the very top of a user's timeline, or in Twitter mobile apps. There is no minimum spend, and advertisers pay when users retweet, @reply to, favourite, or click on a promoted tweet.
  

Figure 13.5.7: A plain text tweet promoting a brand with a downloadable coupon Adapted From Twitter, 2017

• Single image card, is a tweet with a single image.
• Multi-image card includes up to 4 images that users can click on each image to enlarge.
  

Figure 13.5.8: A Multi-Image card on Twitter Adapted From Adparlor, 2016

• Promoted video, a tweet that includes a single video.
• Basic App card and Image app card, a tweet that includes a call to action button that installs the app, or directs users to their App store.
• Video app card, an app install tweet that includes a video.
• Website card, a tweet that includes a button that takes the user to the website.
• Lead Generation Card, a tweet card that enables a user's details to be autofilled in and sent to the brand with the simple click of a button.
  

Figure 13.5.9: A Lead generation card Adapted From Adparlor, 2016

• Conversational ads, are ads that enables brands to engage directly with users, and that users can share with their followers.
  

These are the most popular options available, but there are others. You can find a full list of Twitter cards here; they change fairly frequently, so make sure to check in often: dev.twitter.com/cards/types

Targeting options

Twitter targeting options are nearly as detailed as Facebook. You can choose an audience based on:

• Location (country, state, region, metro area, or postal codes)
• Gender
• Language
• Device, platform, and carrier
• Keywords
• Followers
• Interests
• Tailored audiences (you can upload a list of emails or Twitter IDs, or you can put a code snipped on your website to collect visitors, purchasers, or downloaders and then target them)
• TV targeting (to target users who engage with television programs in a specific market, or by show)
• Behaviours
• Events (users interested in global or regional events).
  

Twitter advertising tips

• Use your own campaign, specific hashtags rather than using generic ones
• Use multiple tweets per campaign, test your options
• Include a deadline
• Monitor influencers, what works for others could work for you
• Make sure your ads contain content worth sharing.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn ads allows you to create and place adverts on prominent pages on the LinkedIn website, including a user's home page, search results pages, groups and more. It has both self-service and premium options, and offer 'sponsored updates' as a self-service option. There is a minimum budget requirement of US $10 a day, though no minimum spend, that is, you have to budget at least US $10 a day, but you don't actually have to spend any of it. Ads can be served on a CPM or CPC basis.

Objectives

LinkedIn offers 3 main objectives:

1. Reach LinkedIn members in their LinkedIn feed and beyond.
2. Drive targeted ads across multiple LinkedIn pages.
3. Send targeted messages directly to those who matter the most to your business.

Ad types offered

LinkedIn offers five types of ad:

• Sponsored content
• Sponsored InMail (reaching your audience through their LinkedIn inbox)
• Dynamic Ads
• Display Ads
• Text ads.

Figure 13.5.10: LinkedIn ad types. (Source: LinkedIn)

Sponsored stories are when content posted on a brand's profile is promoted through display ads or into the feeds of users across the LinkedIn network, according to your targeting preferences. Text ads can be shown on the right-hand side across desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Figure 13.5.11: LinkedIn ads Adapted From Screenshot, LinkedIn, 2017

Targeting options

LinkedIn offers many targeting options, including:

•     Job title
•     Job function
•     Seniority
•     Industry
•     Skills
•     Degrees
•     Geography
•     Age
•     Gender
•     Company name
•     Company size
•     LinkedIn group.
  

LinkedIn advertising tips

• Test variations of your ads to see which is the most successful. The text ad option allows you to create up to 15 variations of a single ad.
  

Note

You can find more information about LinkedIn advertising at: business.linkedin.com/.

• Consider your budget carefully. Sponsored InMail ensures you'll at least be seen by your target, and display ads are a good way to stay top of mind, but both can be quite expensive.
• Make sure you use all the allotted characters for ad copy to describe your service.
• Use images with the correct ratio so that they look good, both on desktop and mobile.
  

Pinterest

Pinterest advertising is still relatively new and has limited availability worldwide. A business account is necessary to advertise on this platform.

Objectives

When creating a Pinterest Promoted Pin, you will be asked to choose a goal for your campaign. Your options are:

Traffic campaign: To draw users to your website

Engagement campaign: To encourage close ups, repins and clicks on your Pin

Awareness campaign: To reach a wide audience.

Ad types offered

The only ad type on Pinterest is Promoted Pin. Here, you select an already existing Pin to use. When you choose a Pin while setting up an ad, you have the option to filter your Pins to see which are your best-performing (most clicked and most repinned) Pins from the last 30 days.

Targeting options

Targeting options for Pinterest are:

• Interests and Keywords: You have 420 interests to choose from, and you can manually add keywords, import an existing list of keywords, or use the keywords that Pinterest recommends for you. Choose carefully, and try not to use all 150 keywords that the platform allows you to add, be focused.
• Specific audience: Users who have visited your site or app, engaged with Pins that link to your site, or – similar to Facebook's 'lookalike' audience – an 'actalike' audience that is similar to users who are already engaging with you.
• Location
• Language
• Device
• Gender.
  

Pinterest advertising tips

• Make sure that the ads you select reflect your brand promise. Misleading or exaggerated claims are more than a bad idea; Pinterest prohibits them.
  

Note

Read more about advertising with Pinterest at: https://ads.pinterest.com.

• Use vertical images. This isn't required, but users prefer it.
• Optimise your pins for mobile viewing.
• Research Pinterest trends so that you can keep your campaigns relevant.
  

Snapchat

Snapchat's paid advertising options are relatively young, but they have grown almost as rapidly as the app itself. There are a variety of ways that brands can advertise on Snapchat.

1. Lenses and geo-filters
2. Discover channels
3. Live channels
4. With influencers
5. Takeover
6. Promotion
7. Unboxing
8. Product placements.

Objectives

Snapchat does not require you to select an objective to create an ad, but it can help you reach the usual objectives, such as:

• Visit a mobile website
• Install an app
• Watch a long-form video
• View an article.

Ad types offered

Snapchat offers a few unusual ways to reach your audience:

• Snap Ads: Mobile video ads that can be up to ten seconds long and will be vertical and full screen. Users can swipe up and reveal extended content, which could be an article, app install, long-form video, or mobile website.

Figure 13.5.12: Snap Ads for Suicide squad, Mike & Ike and Lipton Adapted From Curalate, 2016

• Sponsored Geofilters: A small piece of art or writing that covers part of the snap. A business chooses a location (or more than one), and when Snapchatters in that location take a Snap, the sponsored Geofilter appears as a filter option that can help users explain the context of that snap. This is great for local targeting and can cover a specific location, event, or theme (for examples, coffee shops across Florida). Sponsored Geofilters should be fun and attractive, provide context to the Snap, and encourage users to share them.

Figure 13.5.13: A sponsored Geofilter Adapted From Snapchat, 2017

Note

Take a look at the first campaign to use limited-time Geofilters, where McDonald's achieved 12 million filter snaps, 308 million filter views, and 400 million filter impressions: http:// shortyawards.com/8th/ mcdonalds-geofilters

• Sponsored Lenses: An interactive ad. The brand creates an interactive filter that can be added to a Snap, an animation can be added, and the Lens can be shared or posted to users' own Snap Stories. They are a lot more complex to develop, and thus are a very costly and labour intensive option. Many movie franchises have found great success in raising awareness for new releases.

Figure 13.5.14: A sponsored Lens advertising the Alien Covenant movie Adapted From Adespresso, 2017.

Targeting options

Snapchat includes a variety of targeting options:

• Snapchat Audience Match: Brands can anonymously match data from an existing list of email addresses and mobile device IDs to Snapchat's consumer data. Users can opt out of being included.
• Snapchat Lifestyle Categories: Brands can target users who view certain types of videos, such as pets or cooking.
• Lookalikes: Like the Facebook option, brands can target users with characteristics similar to their existing customers.
  

Snapchat is also aiming to up their targeting game by enabling marketers to use data from offline purchases to target users with relevant ads.

Snapchat advertising tips

• As always, make sure your content fits the platform: Snapchat is informal and natural, using fun filters and add-ons, rather than the more posed images you might see on Instagram.
  

Note

Read more about Snapchat advertising at www.snapchat.com/ads.

• Tell a story: Test your content to see what works best.
• Use influencers: This is a great way to reach even more users.

Other platforms

Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive examination of available platforms for social media advertising. For example, some marketers still like Google+, and YouTube is a huge platform for marketers. YouTube offers a wide range of advertising formats and options for businesses. These are covered in detail in the chapter on video marketing.

Different countries have different preferred platforms. For example, Weibo and WeChat are very big in China. Check out a case study focusing on Russian audiences here: www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/casestudies/2017/01/social_media_case_ study_asos_reaches_russian_audience_through_vk_and_yandex.php#more

Make sure you do your research so that you know which platforms your audience is active on and where you might want to advertise. For example, Reddit (www. reddit.com), along with similar content curation platforms, is great for sharing good content, but the community is very advertising-savvy and does not welcome overt ads that do not provide value to the user.

You may also want to keep an eye on up-and-coming platforms, such as Wanelo (wanelo.com).

Advantages and challenges

Some of the difficulties of advertising on social media are the same as the difficulties of being on social media in general. They include:

• Promoted posts all need to work hard to make an authentic connection with the audience.
• You need to consistently promote good content.
• There is always the chance that your audience will respond negatively to a post, which can escalate quickly.
• Choosing the right platform to advertise on can be a challenge.
• Tying ad spend on social media to revenue increases can be difficult, since the benefits of advertising on these platforms are often indirect. Take a look at Sprout Social's Ultimate Guide to Measuring Social Media ROI for some tips: sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-roi-guide.
  

It is important to clarify with whomever you are reporting to that ROI on social media is not an exact science. Far more data is available than on traditional media, but it has its limits. So rather than drawing a clear line from social media advertising to sales, look at encouraging behaviours that lead to sales, such as convincing users to sign up for a test drive rather than attempting to sell a car. You can easily calculate ROI if you know how many signups for test drives you get from Facebook, and how many test drives result in sales.

Despite its challenges, advertising on social media cannot be avoided. If you want to reach the maximum possible number of users with granular targeting that ensures you're reaching exactly the right users at the right time, social media advertising is the way to go. It is also the only way to ensure that a significant portion of your audience per platform will see your posts.

Like social media in general, advertising on this channel can:

• Increase brand recognition
• Improve brand loyalty.
  

It is:

• Fairly low cost
• Easy to share, and
• Allows for real-time analysis of your campaigns and audience.

The bigger picture

Social media advertising ties in with any number of other marketing channels. You can use it to push content marketing to an audience that will appreciate it and encourage shares and earned media coverage, to drive traffic to your website, to push offline campaigns and encourage chatter about them, and much more. Any marketing campaign should keep social media advertising in mind as a potential way to increase reach and engagement.

The incredible targeting opportunities offered by social media advertising allow content to reach exactly the right audience at the right time to encourage interaction or conversions, and paid promotion is the best way to boost the reach of any post.

Measuring success

Measuring the success of your social media advertising activities can be tricky. As mentioned, ROI can be difficult to establish, but it can be done!

Note

Not only is ‘number of followers' a vanity metric, too many followers who are not quality followers can actually harm you. Remember, only a tiny percentage of your total audience will see your content organically, so you want them to be engaged.

First, you want to identify your KPIs. Note the difference between vanity metrics and those metrics that will actually be useful. The number of fans on Facebook, for example, is a vanity metric. It doesn't mean much on its own. Instead, you would want to look at percentage increase in number of fans, or the engagement rate of the fans that you have, to see whether you are doing well.

The KPIs you identify as important will depend on the goals of any campaign you run. For example:

• If you want to drive revenue, your important KPIs will be sales related such as product purchases, signups for trials, or traffic to your website (which could then turn into a conversion).
• If your goal is awareness, your most important KPI might be reach.
• If your goal is building customer relationships, you would want to look at engagement numbers and sentiment.
  

If you want to attach actual monetary value to your KPIs, you need to decide what method you want to use. Do you want to look at average sales, the lifetime value of a customer, or how much similar reach would cost you if you used different methods of advertising?

To measure your KPIs, you'll need to use the analytics tool of the platform you're advertising on (see below). You can use Google Analytics to see whether social drives traffic to your website, to which specific posts you can attribute revenue, to find out how visitors from social consume your content, and to discover how social impacts conversions. Find out more about how to do this here: www.socialmediaexaminer. com/how-to-measure-social-media-using-google-analytics-reports and here: blog.hootsuite.com/tracking-social-media-in-google-analytics.

You may also consider social media dashboards like Hootsuite, which help you monitor campaigns across platforms.

Tools of the trade

The most important tools you'll need here are the analytics tool for each platform you work on:

• Facebook Page Insights: www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebookpage-insights-basics
• Facebook Ads Manager: https://www.facebook.com/business/ help/415745401805534
• Facebook Power Editor: https://www.facebook.com/business/ help/162528860609436
• Instagram Insights: www.facebook.com/business/help/1533933820244654. You can also find some free Instagram analytics tools here: socialbeesmedia.com/best-free-instagram-analytics-tools-2016
• Twitter Analytics: analytics.twitter.com
• LinkedIn's Campaign Manager: www.linkedin.com/uas/login
• Pinterest Analytics: analytics.pinterest.com
• It can be difficult to measure on Snapchat, but a few tools exist, such as Snaplytics: snaplytics.io.
  

Google Analytics can also be used. You can find a list of 5 Tools to Measure Social Media ROI here: www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-tools-to-measure-social-media-roi.

As mentioned, you may also want to consider a social media dashboard. Some popular options include:

• Hootsuite: hootsuite.com
• Sprout Social: lps.sproutsocial.com/social-media-dashboard
• Fan Page Robot (a free tool): fanpagerobot.com
• Datorama: direct.datorama.com/lp4.

Case study - Kraft Mac and Cheese

One-line summary

To show off its new recipe, Kraft Mac & Cheese created a first-of-its-kind Snapchat Lens that used gamification to engage users (Digital Training Academy, 2016).

The challenge

Kraft wanted to share with their customers the news that they had removed artificial flavours, preservatives, and dyes from Kraft Mac & Cheese. They wanted a nostalgic campaign that would reach a younger audience, so they chose Snapchat as their platform.

The solution

The brand created the 'It's changed. But it hasn't'. campaign, partnering with Snapchat to create a Sponsored Lens that was interactive and encouraged engagement through gamification.

With this Lens, Snapchatters could virtually catch macaroni with their mouths. Each successful catch scored them points. This gamification aspect encouraged sending and receiving snaps with this Lens.

Figure 13.9.1: A Lens Snap from the 'It's changed. But it hasn't.' campaign Adapted From OurKevdigital, 2016

The results

The brand saw very favourable results from this campaign.

• It reached almost 20 million Snapchatters.
• 84% of those who remembered the Lens enjoyed it.
• Snapchatters played with the lens for an average of 20 seconds.
• Kraft Mac & Cheese saw a five point increase in brand favourability.
• They saw a 13% lift in purchase intent.

Social media advertising(Summary)