A Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Advertising

Last year, internet advertising surpassed newspaper advertising spending for the first time. Advertisers spent $5.1 billion on social media advertising in 2013 and this figure is expected to exceed $14 billion by 2018. In the third quarter of 2014, Facebook brought in $2.96 billion in advertising revenue, 66 percent of which came from mobile ads. Twitter generated 85% of its total revenue from mobile advertising in the same quarter, representing about $320 million.

Still not convinced of the value of social ads?

On Facebook, desktop ads have 8.1x higher click-through rates and mobile ads have 9.1x higher click-through rates than normal web ads. Meanwhile, Promoted Tweets have shown average engagement rates of 1-3 percent—much higher than traditional banner ads. It’s no wonder that by June of this year, nearly 80% of US marketers were using promoted Tweets.

Social media advertising isn’t just a buzzword anymore. It’s a real, tangible driver of leads and sales, and marketing departments are increasing their social ad spend across the board in response. Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are filled with hundreds of millions of consumers. Why wouldn’t you take advantage?

To help you make use of these valuable new advertising tools, here is our beginner’s guide to social media advertising:

General Tips for Social Media Advertising

Earlier this year, Hootsuite’s CEO Ryan Holmes put together six ways to use social media ads to grow your business. Here are his tips for social media advertising:

1. Use free social media to beta-test your paid social ads

You’re likely already sending out multiple Tweets, Facebook Posts and LinkedIn Updates every day. Some of these messages will resonate with followers; others won’t. Track which ones are being clicked, shared and commented on. These high-performing messages make the best candidates for native social ads.

2. Take advantage of targeting features

One of the major issues with traditional ads is inefficiency. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media advertising platforms offer very effective targetting capabilities to address that problem. From targeting social media managers on LinkedIn to Game of Thrones fans on Facebook, take advantage of this very useful targeting for more efficiency in advertising.

3. Rotate ads frequently

With TV commercials and other traditional “interruption ads,” repetition is the name of the game. But Promoted Tweets and Sponsored Posts appear right in users’ news feeds. Engagement rates and business will suffer if you repeat the same ads. Instead, always provide fresh ad content and rotate your content between different demographics.

4. Use small samples to A/B test your social ads

One of the great virtues of social ads is instant feedback. You can gauge the effectiveness of a sponsored post in minutes, and follow up with advanced analytics reports. With all this available data, you should be sending out several “test” ads to small audiences, tracking the results, and then pushing winning ads to larger groups. It’s cheaper and more effective.

5. Understand how ads are sold

Different networks sell ads in different ways. On Twitter, companies pay on an engagement basis. Facebook and LinkedIn offer the option of paying per impression. It’s critical to design Tweets and Posts accordingly. For example, since we pay Twitter each time users click on our ads, it’s important that people be genuinely interested in the content on the other side. The goal here is to drive genuine prospects to our site, not merely to attract views.

6. Design your ads with smartphones in mind.

Social media is consumed overwhelmingly on mobile devices. Twitter users spend 86 percent of their time on the service on mobile. Facebook users aren’t far behind at 68 percent. This means most social media ads are being viewed on mobile devices, as well. As a result, messages have to be optimized for viewing on small mobile screens. While this may seem like a pain, Twitter recently unveiled a feature enabling paid Tweets to be targeted by zip code, so it’s also a huge advantage.

These six tips can be explored in more detail in the original post.

Twitter Advertising

Ad types

There are three different kinds of Twitter Ads: Promoted Accounts, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Tweets.

Promoted Tweets are messages that will appear directly in the timelines of the Twitter users you targeted and at a specific time you have bid on.
A Promoted Account is an ad that invites targeted Twitter users to follow your brand – attracting more of the right followers to your brand faster.
Trending topics on Twitter are the most talked about subjects on the social network, appearing on the left side of the page. Promoted Trends allow you to put your story at the top of that list for 24-hours.

Your Twitter ad campaigns will also be categorized by objective. Twitter ads can have Tweet engagement, website clicks or conversions, app installs or app engagement, video views, follower growth, and Twitter lead collection as possible objectives. Your choice will depend on what you hope to achieve with your ads, your audience and your budget, since some of these objectives will drain your budget faster than others (engagement is far easier to achieve than app installs).

Audience and targeting

Twitter is one of the social ad platforms that allows you to target your ads to specific groups of people. Like most platforms, Twitter allows you to target based on location, gender, languages, interests and device. You can also upload specific lists of people (your email list for example) to target with ads.

But Twitter targeting is especially valuable if you’re looking to target people based on their networks. Basically, if you have a coffee shop in Vancouver, the strength of Twitter ads is that you can target audiences already following rival coffee shops in the city. You can also target people who are similar to your follower base, which is a great way to find your target audience.

Pricing

The cost of Twitter ads depends really on the ad type. Promoted Tweets and accounts might cost you anywhere from 50 cents to 10 dollars or more per engagement (video view, link click, follow, etc.) based on how targeted your ad is. Promoted Trends on the other hand have been reported to cost $200,000 a day.

The key here is testing your ads. Run a few short campaigns with a small budget to find out which objective is right for your audience and your budget. Twitter only charges you when a user completes the action set out in your campaign objective anyways, so all of these campaigns will provide some value. Good advice for advertisers is to look at what other advertisers are bidding for similar ads, which is information Twitter provides anyways.

How to buy

Once you sign into the Twitter ads platform (and insert your payment information), actually buying Twitter ads is a simple six-step process.

Step 1: Start a new ad campaign

You will have to name your campaign, choose your funding source and customize your start and end dates before anything else.

Step 2: Choose ad objective

The next step towards building you ad is choosing a campaign objective. Simply select an option from Twitter’s list.

Step 3: Target your ad

Choose from among Twitter’s targeting options. They provide an estimated audience size to help guide you.

Step 4: Build your ad

Build your ad by adding copy, and any images and video.

Step 5: Set your budget

You can set daily maximum as well as total campaign budgets. Twitter stops showing your ads once your budget has been reached, so that you don’t have to manually end campaigns to avoid being charged.

Step 6: Place your bid and start advertising

Purchasing Twitter ads works on a bidding system. You set your bid for how much you’re willing to spend for a specific user action (website visit, retweet, etc.). Others will be placing competitive bids, but the most you’ll pay is one cent more than the next highest bid. Once you win your bid, your ads will immediately go into play. They’ll continue until your budget runs out.