Simple Guide to Social Media Advertising (+ Examples & Types)

When it comes to social media advertising, the assumption is that once you place an ad, the sales, leads, and conversions will come automatically.

But it takes choosing the right platform and type of ad to run a successful advert campaign.

Social media advertising is the activity of advertising to your targeted audience what you have to offer, via social media platforms.?

Social media advertising is an effective marketing strategy because it reaches a wide range of people ( your target audience ) fast and at once.

With the right research on your target audience, ( their demographic, age, interests, pain points, ), you can create a highly converting social media ad.

Here are a few benefits of social media advertising:

1. Increases Brand Awareness

2. Drives traffic to your website and physical store

3. Cost-effective as compared to other types of advertising

4. Easily engage with your audience. You get to learn about them too

• 9 out of 10?people buy from brands they follow on social media.
• 73.5%?of internet users follow or research brands and products on social media.
• 79%?of people say user-generated content highly impacts their buying decisions.

Social Media Ads: Types & Examples

Facebook Ads

Facebook is the largest social media platform, with a total of?1.88 billion?daily users.

It is a guarantee that with the right targeting, you can reach quite a number of your target audience. There are different types of Facebook Ads:

1. Image Ads

2. Video Ads

3. Carousel Ads

4. Story Ads

5. Collection Ads

6. Messenger Ads

7.Slideshow Ads

8. Playable Ads

Instagram Ads

Instagram offers a wonderful platform to engage with your audience visually. Owned by Facebook Instagram is loved by many, and Ads do really well. You are able to define your target audience with custom targeting options.

Here are the types of Instagram Ads:

The specific Instagram ad types mirror four of the Facebook ads types:

• Photo
• Video
• Carousel
• Collection

Twitter Ads

Twitter ( Now known as X ) offers two ways for brands to create Twitter ads:

• Twitter Promote automatically promotes Tweets for you. (Note: this service is no longer available to new users.)
• Twitter Ads campaigns allow you to set up campaigns yourself based on your marketing objective.

LinkedIn Ads

Advertising on LinkedIn helps businesses of any size achieve their goals.

With over 750M active professionals, you get to target a unique audience. Here the types of LinkedIn Ads

1. Sponsored Content

Sponsored Content ads?appear in the news feed on both desktop and mobile. They’re used to get your content in front of a larger audience and showcase your brand expertise.

2. InMail?Ads

These Ads go straight to the user's LinkedIn inbox.?However, Sponsored InMail has an interesting unique feature. Users only receive ad messages while they are active on LinkedIn. That means messages don’t sit around getting stale.

3. Text Ads

Text ads?are small ad units that appear at the top right of the LinkedIn news feed. They only appear to desktop users, not on mobile devices.

4. Dynamic Ads

Dynamic ads?are automatically personalized specifically for each of your prospects.?

There are many other ad types depending on which platform you are using. Choosing which platform to run ads on should be done with careful consideration to avoid ads that do not perform well.

Place an Ad on a platform where your target audience is.