Giving your business an online presence is only the first step in the direction of extending your consumer-base to epic proportions. But in order to gain any meaningful traffic to your website, you’re going to need to start dabbling in paid social media promotion.

 

Essentially, instead of just having a social media page for your business to gain passive traffic, you can pay those social platforms: Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter to gain the ability to put ads out targeting people with interests aligned with your business.

 

There are plenty of reasons why you need to start doing paid social promotion:

 

Targeting a specific audience

One of the perks of using paid social is the ability to target your ads in such a way that they’ll appear to people who would be most likely to pay attention to them. This could be based on the information from their profile, activity, and interests. A good example of this is Facebook, businesses can upload information from their customer databases and use that information to search for other people on the platform that match the information closely. This is called a lookalike audience. 

 

Not to even mention the fact that there are a variety of social media platforms you can promote yourself on, all of which have differing user-bases and goals. If you’re working on a limited budget, it is pertinent to have a strategy for which social media platforms you want to target specifically to get the best prospective audience.

 

Cost-effective

The way that a lot of social media platforms do paid social is on a PPC (pay per click) model. Advertisers bid on keywords that their company is associated with and what people will search. When people search using those specific keywords, an ad for the company will potentially be shown. Though, ad placement will be dependent on a couple factors being optimized in order to be placed front and center. 

 

The average price of some of these keywords vary per platform and industry. Prices for the keywords on Facebook can vary between $0.67 and $3.77. But looking at the median cost per click across all the big social media platforms brings us to this:

 

-Facebook: $0.51

-Twitter: $0.53

-Instagram: $1.28

-LinkedIn: $5.61

 

On the opposite end, if you’re looking to adopt the CPM (Cost per impression) model the prices differ a bit from above per 1000 impressions:

 

-Facebook: $9.06

-Twitter: $5.76

-Instagram: $6.70

-LinkedIn: $6.05

 

An even wider net

Getting paid social for one or several of the many popular social media platforms out there is a must. But above all, it must work for your customers or it won’t be effective. Where do your customers spend time and what captures their attention? It is worth investing in figuring out how to better target your audience before investing in social for the sake of social.

 

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest may have one thing in common, becoming increasingly on trend with visuals. However, the kind of visual content the ad has is just as important to differentiate as is the copy it has. 

 

 A big reason why paid social works is because these platforms are visual heavy mediums, with the text being secondary. In comparison, on Google you’re trying to grab the user’s attention and get an instant conversion and lots of clicks. An ad on social media may gain influence over time, and with enough traction it could be exposed to more people on that social media platform.

 

If you’re not using paid social, it’s never too late to start promoting yourself. There are so many social media platforms to choose from and can be cost effective. If you’re looking for more information on paid social media promotion or digital marketing services, contact us today!