Investing in Paid Social Media via Facebook

Author: Patrick Taylor

By now, you have probably heard of social media marketing, and how helpful it can be to your firm. However, you may not be sure if you want to invest in paid advertising, or organic advertising. Well, as the reach of organic social media ads are declining, more firms are investing in paid social media advertising, which helps in targeting audiences, and driving sales. With the ‘boosting’ feature of apps like Facebook, you can boost the amount of views your organic content gets (turning it to paid advertising), thus making it paid advertising the ideal social media marketing strategy for many firms.

Paid social media is the method of displaying advertisements on popular social media platforms. Each platform is different, ranging from Twitter, used for short-form content, Instagram focuses on visual-based content, LinkedIn is focused on networking professionals, and Facebook has its marketplace.

Due to this large variation in social platforms, paid social media will also differ on each platform. This variation will depend on the social channel you use, and the audience you are reaching. Let’s first take a look at some of the different audiences you may be targeting.

Facebook Advertising Formats

Facebook has become the largest social media platform with over 2 billion monthly active users. The platform offers a wide variety of ad formats to select from:

·     Video Ads- Short clips to longer stories, works well across all types of objects

·     Canvas Ads- ‘Instant-loading full-screen experience for mobile users allowing them to zoom in and tilt to interact with images

·     Collection Ads- Allows you to showcase relevant products/features, ideal for all campaign objectives as they let people discover, browse, and purchase

·     Carousel Ads- Used to showcase up to 10 images or videos within a single ad, great way to tell a brand’s story

·     Slideshow Ads- Video-like ads using motion, sound, and text to tell your story. Inexpensive and cost-effective to create as you can use existing images/videos

·     Photo Ads- Great way to increase awareness of who you are and what you do through the use of a single image and compelling copy

Facebook Targeting Options 

On Facebook, you have three options to build your audience and target your ads:

·     Core audiences- Allows you to reach people based on their demographics, location, interests, and behaviors.

·     Custom audiences- Find your existing customers and contacts on Facebook. You can use different data sources to build your audiences, such as contact lists, website visitors, and App users.

·     Lookalike audiences- Helps you find people on Facebook similar to your customers

If you aren’t sure which audience your company is targeting in their social media campaign, Facebook even has an Audience Insights tool that will help you get a better understanding of your audience. For creating ads, Facebook also has a great tool called the Creative Hub, where you can practice making different ads for different audiences.

The first step you will need to take is to create a Facebook Page for your mockup. For my example, I will be using a page I am already an admin on, but you may have to create a new one for this exercise. Next, you will select the format you would like to use, either single image/video or carousel, which is two or more images/videos. After uploading your file or using one already posted on your page, you are now able to create your mockup ad! If you want to create a new image, instead of using a post on your page, Canva is a great free design site where I created my image for the ad. Here is an example of the ad I created for my Puppyland=Puppy Mill Facebook Page:

Another great feature of the mockup tool is the ability to create the same ad in 16 different placements such as Facebook stories, marketplace, Instagram, and more:

Next you are ready to move your ad over to the Facebook ad manager. This button can be found at the top right of your screen:

Now we are ready to implement the new knowledge of audiences that you now have! As mentioned early, you can select from Core Audiences, Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences. Due to the fact that the page I am using for this example was only recently created, and not having a set audience already recognized, I will be creating one for a custom audience.

In defining your audience for your custom audience, you want to think specifically as possible so that your ad reaches the right people. Unless you are a big firm, you probably don’t have the budget to set a super wide audience and defining this will help Facebook show your ad to people who are most likely to be interested in your firm. That being said, the more details you at to your detailed target, the broader your audience will become. So when thinking specifically, use limited number of key words, versus trying to be as descriptive as possible.

As you can see above, I have picked one demographic, and three interests. Leaving these interests as basic as possible will help me reach more people when running my ad. Keep in mind, you want these interests to be similar to your page or company values because otherwise you are going to end up paying to show your ad to people who don’t see the value in your firm. Due to the content of my ad though, I wanted to get it out to dog lovers alike, not just activists. This way people who are in the process of potentially buying a new puppy will see the ad and hopefully not support puppy mills. At the same time those interested in animal rights may find my page more helpful and interact with it more, so I wanted my audience to be fairly broad.

As the picture above indicates, by selecting the one demographic and three interests, I was able to select a fairly broad audience that I believe will be interested in my page. Now moving forward, I could potentially run a new ad, and base it off of the audience used for this ad, and Facebook will be able to advertise it to a new Lookalike Audience. This would help me reach even more people, who also have similar interests to the ones I have already defined.

For some additional resources when creating your paid advertising strategies, check out Hootsuite or Sendible. Both are great tools in measuring your firm’s social media management. You can build and schedule posts, engage with users, listen to feeds for mentions that you can turn to leads with either site. Hootsuite is slightly better for collaborating with teams on, while Sendible offers slightly more intense analytics.