To promote your content, you need to go far beyond just posting it. In this lesson, our expert, Lena Carlson, will discuss why social media advertising, or SMA, is useful for your social media presence and how you should target your audience using it. We will also discuss the different platforms you can use to advertise your content from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Transcript
Social media is such a great medium and definitely you should embrace it and can help you grow your following and really connect and engage with your audience. That being said, I think really mastering social media is getting harder and harder and you really are fighting to capture people’s attention. A lot of the advice you will read online now is spend a lot of money on ads, which is great, but I think you always need to take a step back and think first about the messaging and what you’re really putting out there and why you’re putting it out there and think about it a lot more intentionally. So there’s no point in wasting money on every platform just trying to blast your message out there.
Actually, you can be a lot more effective by really thinking about what your message is, who you really want to target, where are they, and then putting your money into that. And then, if you want to experiment with ads, which I think is definitely something that people should do, is thinking about how can we A/B test a few elements? And that means to test different pictures against each other, different messages against each other and different audiences against each other to find out which one really resonates. Because that will save you a lot of money and time to put in that work at the beginning and then you can really invest the time with connecting and engaging with that audience. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and just experiment a little bit. And also the major social medias now such as Facebook have amazing guidelines on how to really use their advertising platform. So don’t go into it without doing the research first.
When it comes to target groups on social media, I think there really is no limit. The sky’s the limit. And the platforms now such as Facebook and Instagram and even LinkedIn, are really impressive how deep those targeting groups can go. So, I would really advise people before they actually get into the creation of the ads is to, again, take a step back and think about who is your target audience and what are the traits and characteristics and values that really represent them and really do a deep dive into who those audiences are. And think a little bit outside of the box so that when you come to putting in all the details on the platform, then you’ve really thought about who that should include and aren’t just clicking the first attributes you see on the platform.
When you’re deciding which platform to use, you need to think about the “why” and then, once you’ve really understood why you’re doing this, you need to think about what your key messages, and who your audience is. And I would, one hundred percent, recommending just in the platforms is where you know your audience is. So for small businesses this can definitely vary. You find that cafes and other visually appealing businesses do really well on Instagram. If you just need very direct information or you run a lot of events, then Facebook can be great. And then obviously if you’re moving into tech, then you can have like surprising success on other platforms such as Github or Reddit. So it really depends. There’s no one answer to what is the right platform for you as a small business owner, but definitely do the research, find out where your target audience is, and also think about in which way you prefer to communicate your message because that’ll make your decision so much easier.
I encourage everyone, even if you’re not fully committed to putting those ads out now to go and have a play around and just think about the different ways you can communicate what you’re doing. Obviously, you have your single image ads, which is exactly what that is, basically just one image with text underneath. You can also now do videos, carousels and you can do ads that link to different places. So whether you want people to learn more or instantly sign up to something, you can play around with all of those features. It’s also constantly changing, so always check in with Facebook and Instagram’s most up-to-date guidelines on what kind of ads they can create because they’re always surprising us with something new. LinkedIn is a little bit different to Facebook and Instagram ads, in that they’re way more expensive to run. But you can run those ads for looking for new positions or if you want to promote an article or an event as well. When it comes to LinkedIn, it’s very much the process of thinking about who is this for, what’s the key message, and who are the people that I really want to target, and then taking it from there.
Get Started with Facebook and Instagram Ads
Social Media Advertising is a great way to reach your target audience. And Facebook (along with Instagram) has the most targeted form of advertising. In these platforms, you can create ads that will reach your chosen audience by selecting characteristics like age, interests, behaviour, location and more. If you already know who you exactly want to target, then you can really use social media advertising to engage people to your business.
Now that you’ve learned more about this from our expert, we have prepared a checklist to help you go through the steps in creating your Facebook and Instagram Ads. Are you ready? Take a pen and download the worksheet below!
