5 Tips For Optimizing Your Paid Social Strategy
It pays to pay to expand your brand’s social media reach.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a successful business today that doesn’t use social media in some way, shape, or form. Because it is such an efficient way of reaching and engaging with your target audience or demographic, it really is a waste of an opportunity not to use various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to tap into your communities. As they say, “your brand is not what you say about it; it’s what other people say about it.” Social media is the ideal venue to tap into and listen to that conversation.
However, as social media has evolved as a key marketing pathway, the techniques and methods one must use to find success have become more complicated. The more people and brands who use social media to spread their message, the more crowded it gets and the harder it becomes to make sure your message breaks through. As the prominent content marketing firm Brafton put it: “Organic social content is disappearing from News Feeds. Studies show brand’s posts are reaching a minuscule fraction of their audiences and exposure will only continue to diminish. At the same time, advertising is becoming more expensive.”
While you don’t have to resort to expensive conventional advertising, upgrading your social strategy from organic to paid can be a great way of mitigating this shift and make traction in a crowded marketplace. Networks like Facebook and Twitter are powerful because they offer an antidote to “interruptive marketing.” That is, by using their massive amounts of user data they are able to serve users with ads that they actually want to see, rather than a pop-up or billboard or magazine ad that has to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Utilizing a paid social media strategy allows you to target the very demographic whose online habits have indicated that they might want to use your business’s services or buy your products—even if they haven’t heard of you yet.
Here are some tips for jumpstarting your social strategy from organic to paid:
Be mindful of ad placement: Success on social media in the advertising sense has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time. Decide where your target demographic is most likely to be browsing, and make sure you focus on that network.
Mobile optimize everything: Don’t bother with paid Facebook ads or promoted posts if they’re not going to display well on a mobile screen. More than 80 percent of Facebook’s traffic is mobile, so adjust accordingly. And always keep in mind that the general trend is that people tend to “prospect on mobile, but convert on desktop”, so make sure your ads are meeting your customer where they are in the sales journey.
Utilize your own website data: If you know that a visitor to your website has been eyeing a particular product, you can use that information to serve them with an ad on another network. Utilizing cross-channel social media marketing means targeting visitors with ads for content you already know they are after in another location on social media.
Follow best practice on Facebook: Details are what make a Facebook ad successful, so make sure you’re using an attractive image, have a strong call to action and that you localize your ads for the demographic they will be serving.
Follow best practice on Twitter: When it comes to running a Twitter campaign, the rules can be slightly different. Create multiple tweets per day, but not too many (3-5 per campaign), make it clear what your audiences should do once they’ve been served with your tweet, and make sure you respond to any engagement you get.