Facebook and Paid Advertisements

The rise of paid social media marketing is increasing greatly over the years since organic or non-paid marketing has been declining. Social media spending is predicted to top $31 billion, making up 29.4% of digital ad spending. All social media advertising means is any paid content that you use on a social media network like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Companies like Hootsuite and Sendible can help you enhance your online social media marketing. 

Social Media Networks

Facebook allows you to post ads with many different format types. Some examples include: video, canvas, and photo ads. This may be a good network to stay with since it is the largest social media network totaling 2 billion monthly users. Facebook offers three options target your audience: core, custom, and lookalike audiences. We will talk more about these later in the blog. Twitter is also a great social media to use paid advertising on. Twitter offers three different kind of ad types. Promoted Tweets are similar to normal Tweets, but they are purchased by advertisers who want to reach a wide group of users. They appear alongside normal tweets in a user’s timeline so they seamlessly flow with other tweets and don’t really feel like ads. Promoted accounts suggest users Twitter accounts that people don’t follow, but might find interesting. And promoted trends let you put your story at the top of the trending topics list. Finally, Instagram has grown a lot in popularity in the past years which makes this a great platform to put out your advertisements. Instagram offers four types of ads which include photos, video, carousel, and stories ads. Since Facebook owns Instagram, it has a lot of the same audience targeting that Facebook has like using location and interests to target your ad.

Facebook Advertisements

Facebook is a great way for digital markers to put out their ads. Facebook has many features to manage your ads from the Ads Manager to Audience Insights. The social media network has many different ways of gathering target audience information to better enhance your advertisement viewing experience. Core audiences allow you to reach people based on their demographics, location, interests, and behaviors. Custom audiences help you find your existing customer data, making it easy to reconnect with the people who have already shown interest in your business. Lookalike audiences help you find people on Facebook who are similar to your customers. From the billions of users that Facebook has, they are able to know things about you like interests, political stances, and demographics. They use this to better target what ads you see so they aren’t showing you irrelevant ads. As a marketer, all of these tools are a great way to enhance your social media advertisement experience. 

The way Facebook users feel about this is pretty shocking. According to a study done by Pew Research a whopping 74% of Facebooks users did not know that they maintained lists of their interests and traits. And more than half of their users (51%) say they are not comfortable with Facebook compiling this information. Even though this number is so big, these users are still going to use Facebook most likely. Some people find that these interests that Facebook have compiled for them don’t have anything to do with their real interests, but majority of users (59%) say these categories do reflect their real-life interests. Facebook also determines your political standing, which is something I myself didn’t realize. The labels are roughly equally divided between those classified as liberal or very liberal, conservative or very conservative, and moderate. Even though Facebook has audience tools like core and custom audiences, you can tell through this study that Facebook's algorithm still has some work to do.

In today’s age it is very hard for your data to not be shared with businesses online. Most people realize that companies like Facebook and Instagram have data on you, but might not be sure about how much in detail they go. I think we have to come to the realization that social media networks are going to use your data to best target you. As a consumer myself, I have come to terms that social media sites are going to be using my data and I am okay with that. If I am going to be seeing ads on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, I would rather see ads that actually interest me rather than something that I don’t care about at all. Since the platforms are usually all free, they have to make money somehow and this is their main source of that. I think it is pretty naive to think that these media platforms are in the best interest of their users and are running the platform without making any money.