What is a Social Media Ad?

A social media advert is a message that you pay to display on a social media platform.  

The top seven social media sites are currently: 

When it comes to promoting your business and attracting and retaining customers, advertising in social media provides two options: 

• Organic advertising

• Paid advertising

Organic advertising means waiting for people to find your content and your business through its relevance to their lives. Your webpages, blogs, and other content explain your business and how you can meet potential customers’ needs by providing them with solutions to their problems and pain points. Organic advertising is a long-term strategy that builds a consistent flow of potential customers to your business. Organic advertising works to retain and create followers. The organic approach to providing quality content costs less and lasts longer.  The downside is that it takes time for new web pages to rise through the search rankings and establish themselves as authoritative and relevant to searchers.  In social media terms, it is hard to build a following from zero without help. 

Paid social media advertising is a big business because it works to achieve your business goals in a short time frame.  The benefits for a social media advertiser are: 

• You connect with people who are interested in your business because your ads are shown to them through detailed targeting and not to
  the uninterested people. 
• Social media platforms collect a wealth of information about their users, and you get access to a clearly defined target audience for maximum
  benefit from your advertising budget.  
• A new business needs to build awareness, and social media ads reach your potential customers at a time when they are relaxed and
  browsing online.  
• You get to choose a social media platform and an ad format that suits your brand personality so that you can build an authentic connection
  with potential customers. 
• You make the best return on investment because advertising with social media costs less than other forms of media advertising. 

A successful business with strategic goals uses a combination of organic and paid advertising to build a sustainable flow of new customers and a loyal audience.  

For most businesses, a social media presence is no longer optional, your customers are on social media, and if you don’t have your ads and brand representation, then they will see and discover your competitors. Businesses need to go where the customer is – that used to mean a prime location with plenty of people passing by the shop window. Changing times mean that social media is the location where your business needs to be visible, and it competes for visibility. Social media ads are effective at getting you noticed – the first step to attracting a customer. A mobile site can load slightly faster on a mobile phone than a responsive website because the mobile site is good to load straight away. The responsive site must pick the best format. If you have complex information on your site, then the responsive approach attempts to scale this for the mobile phone user – with limited success. A mobile website has preselected the information that is available to the mobile user, and the assumption is that the phone user is not interested in performing any complicated tasks. Third-party services generally don’t work as well with responsive sites as it is challenging to integrate them fully. You can use third-party services like hotel bookings with a dedicated mobile site relatively easily. Both responsive sites and mobile sites provide a mobile phone user with access to your business, the web design process that is right for your business depends on the features and applications you need as well as time and money constraints.

Businesses pay both for advertising (specific social media campaigns to achieve a business goal) and marketing on social media.

Social media marketing depends on organic or natural search results to promote your business, services, and products. You create engaging, useful, and entertaining content blogs, articles, videos, infographics), and your reward comes with consistently high rankings in searches and a steady stream of visitors.

Social media advertising needs creative, useful, and engaging content, but you pay for the opportunity for your material to reach a precisely defined target audience.  All social media channels offer paid or promotional spaces on their pages. You pay for the potential to occupy some of that space, and your reward is a flow of interested potential customers. You know they have some interest in your business because you target your best prospects for conversion. Advertising on social media produces a time-limited flow of traffic, where social media marketing aims at creating a continuous flow of prospective customers and followers.

What is the difference between advertising social media and marketing? Are they different when they are both targeting the same audience? Is it all about the money invested? Social media marketing builds an image of your business on a social media channel.  Before you create a profile on any social media platform for your business, you need to understand your brand and keep it consistent across all the platforms you use.

Social marketing creates and reinforces your brand identity in the mind of your potential and current customers.

Social media advertising, with its focus on selling, is different from social media marketing with its emphasis on promotion and image. But social advertising needs to reinforce and not contradict or harm your brand image. Ultimately marketing and advertising must work together.

Social media advertising is a small subset of social media marketing – it is not a standalone process. It relies on social media marketing for its effectiveness, relevance, and purpose. Social media marketing can exist and be successful without social media advertising. In other words, social media advertising is one of the many tools available to social media marketers.

Before anyone is going to buy your products and services, they need to know who you are. Most people do their initial research about products, services, and businesses online. That includes asking people on community local pages for the equivalent of a word of mouth recommendation for local trades and small jobs. People only buy from businesses they recognize, and if you want to get your brand in people’s minds, you need to be where people go – that’s social media land.

First, you attract their attention, and then you persuade them to stick with you, so they don’t even think about taking their business elsewhere. Your business thrives from retaining customers and building a loyal following. It grows through attracting new customers and keeping them. Social media ads are excellent at attracting new customers, and your interactions with them turn them into loyal repeat customers.

Marketing gurus talk about excellent conversion rates with social media ads, but the bottom line is you sell more. Social media ads put your business in front of interested people, and if they like what they see, then they buy the product or service. The benefit of social media ads is that the social media platform knows who is more likely to respond favorably to your business – they stack the odds in your favor.

Social media ads have put marketing opportunities in the reach of the smallest business.  You get a target audience and pay far less than a TV or billboard campaign used to cost. Social media ads are a game-changer for companies – they reach people for a smaller marketing budget, and they are very effective.

Most social media platforms require a minimum daily spend on paid actions like:

While your campaign is running, the cost varies between the platform and the action.  Digital advertising has different ways of bidding for advertising space:

• CPM – payment per impression, you pay every time your social media ad appears on a page.

• CPC – cost per click, you pay when someone clicks on your social media advert.

• CPV – cost per view; you pay every time someone watches your video.

• CPL – cost per like, when someone likes you, you pay a fee as these class as a conversion.

• CPA – cost per action, a specified action triggers a bill when a social media user does it.

Some payment methods depend on the social media platform:

• CPF – cost per follow, offered by Twitter.

• CPO – cost per open offered by LinkedIn.

The exact cost varies depending on what you want to achieve, the platform you choose, and the way you choose to pay.  As a guide to average prices:

* Reddit tends to do best for organic search marketing unless you are willing to spend megabucks. Reddit is relatively new to social ads, but sponsored posts are available. The above table shows average spending on social media platforms for advertisers; it does not include the additional amount businesses pay social media marketing companies to run their advertising campaigns.

A mobile site can load slightly faster on a mobile phone than a responsive website because the mobile site is good to load straight away. The responsive site must pick the best format. If you have complex information on your site, then the responsive approach attempts to scale this for the mobile phone user – with limited success. A mobile website has preselected the information that is available to the mobile user, and the assumption is that the phone user is not interested in performing any complicated tasks. Third-party services generally don’t work as well with responsive sites as it is challenging to integrate them fully. You can use third-party services like hotel bookings with a dedicated mobile site relatively easily. Both responsive sites and mobile sites provide a mobile phone user with access to your business, the web design process that is right for your business depends on the features and applications you need as well as time and money constraints.

The social media platforms generally give their user free membership. As a result, social media ads are the revenue stream that the platform needs to pay staff and running costs. The purpose of a social media ad is to connect and influence a target audience.

Carousel ads are ideal for providing a mini shop window into a collection of products that users can buy now.  They can also be used to provide information, but they are very effective as sales brochures. All social media ads are useful for the same range of business goals.