An Introduction To Social Media Advertising

Hello. Today we’re going to look quickly at getting started with social
media advertising. We talked in previous videos about where companies that
don’t use social media enough or don’t see it as a priority for their
business. Social media advertising is kind of the same thing. Depending on
your vertical, it can be a really cheap way to get out a load of brand
awareness. We’re seeing a lot of companies now are using various types of
social media advertising. The ones who don’t maybe get left behind a little
bit.

So we’ll start with Facebook, the obvious one. Facebook have a few
different ways of advertising. They did have more, but they’ve cut back on
some of them. The main one is going to be your external link. So as you
look at a page on Facebook, down the right-hand side you have adverts pop
up sometimes. That’s external linking. What they do, is they appear on the
right-hand side to targeted audiences or what Facebook considers to be
targeted audiences. As people click, you pay for the click.

They also do page promotion where you’re trying to get people to like your
page. You’ll have seen that in the same area. That will also go into
newsfeeds and things like that.

They also do promoted posts. Now, if you have a Facebook page, sometimes
you’ll post something up, maybe an image or an offer or something, and
Facebook will give you a notification saying, “This post has performed 90%
better than anything else on your page. Do you want to promote it?” You
then set a budget, and they will start promoting that post for you.

All of these, they are a really good way of advertising. They are a really
good way of increasing brand awareness or say, if you’ve got a special
offer, or something like that. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that for all
industries you use it for general advertising. Click-through rates are
very, very low. Bounce rates are very, very high. It’s not that expensive,
but you are going to be looking at, I think the average last year was a
0.051% click-through rating, something like that.

So it’s not necessarily a conversion builder. None of these really are
conversion builders as such. You will get some, but don’t look at them as
you would look at AdWords or something like that. They are a way of getting
your name out there, of being seen, increasing activity on your Facebook
page more than anything.

Facebook also have a really good ad tool that makes it really easy. It’s
not the creation that’s difficult, it’s the maintenance. So creating them
is really easy. Use the tool and you’ll have some ads out in 20 minutes or
something like that. But maintaining them is the other thing to make sure
you’re not letting your money run away from you, stuff like that.

StumbleUpon also do their own version called Paid Discovery. It’s not ads
exactly. It’s getting in front of the right people. What they will do is
they’ll make sure that your adverts go out to people who have already shown
an interest in that particular subject or in that area, and they’ll push
you into their newsfeed as it were. With StumbleUpon, you can put up
anything you want. It can be an image or a video or just text or whatever.
It does look more natural, so people don’t feel that they’re being
advertised to quite as much.

LinkedIn also have their own version of advertising. I think it’s a minimum
$10 budget that you have to spend, but obviously that’s nothing really
anyway. It is getting bigger. More and more people are using LinkedIn
advertising. Obviously, it’s quite specific. You probably wouldn’t use it
if you were selling party gear or fancy dress or something like that.
LinkedIn is definitely an industry based thing. Maybe if you were trying to
push a PDF or push a website in some way, that’d be a good place to start,
or tools that other industries could use, things like that.

Twitter advertising is a bit different again. Again you’re getting sort of
pushed in front of the right people as opposed to actually showing them
adverts for what you do. It’s very popular. It’s slightly different to
other ways of working. If you do have a Twitter account, if it’s a
successful Twitter account, I definitely recommend it. And to be honest,
even if it’s not, give it a try. With all of these you can set your budgets
really low, so you’re not just going to run away and spend a load of money
on nothing.

The last one is Reddit. Most people don’t really think about Reddit when
they think about social media advertising. It’s quite overlooked, but it’s
a really interesting group of people who use Reddit. They’re very
protective and they’re really engaged. If you do reach out to Reddit users
and you do a good job and they love you, they’ll love you forever. They’ll
promote you, they’ll share you, they’ll talk about you. If you do a bit of
a half-a-job, or try and muck them off by being a bit spammy, they will
destroy you. They will take you down. So, if you’re going to do it, do it
properly or don’t do it at all, or you’ll get called out for it.

I think that’s about it. I would suggest if you’re starting up a new
business, particularly if you’re looking at brand awareness, try all of
them. See what works for you. But as I said, particularly with Facebook,
but with all of them, do be very careful. Keep your budgets low to start
off with until you really know what you’re doing. Things like StumbleUpon
as well, Twitter advertising, you can end up spending more money than you
intend if you’re not careful, if you set your budgets too high.

Yeah, give it a try. See what you think. If you need to know more, you can
check out our blog, have a look at some other videos on the Koozai site, or
try the social media profiles that follow this video. Thanks very much.