Deciding where to spend your marketing budget isn’t easy, but advertising on social media is a great place to invest your dollars because of its highly targeted and trackable nature. Don’t take my word for it though, eMarketer predicts that worldwide social network ad spend will reach nearly $24 billion this year.
Facebook and Twitter advertising can be highly profitable and can reach your audience in ways that other channels simply cannot. We’ve already talked about how to target people effectively on Facebook, how to make the right impression with your ads, and the importance of experimenting with ad copy and images.
Let’s take a step back and talk about how to pick the right campaign to suit your objectives.
Facebook and Twitter have a bevy of different campaign types to suit a wide variety of possible advertising campaign objectives. Whether you’re trying to grow your page, push people to your website, or get more eyes on your latest tweet, there’s an ad type that can help you.
Growth
Twitter and Facebook each have their own version of growth ads. On Facebook you run page like ads and on Twitter you’ll choose promoted account ads. These two ads work the same way, by pushing copy and images that you define in front of your targeted audience, encouraging them to follow your social account.
A strong call to action is recommended for building this type of ad, as you’ll want to give them a clear reason why they will benefit from subscribing to your updates.
Post Promotion
Simply want to push your social messages to more people? Facebook’s page post engagement ads and Twitter’s promoted tweets ads are what you’ll be looking for. By using this ad type, advertisers can push messages out to a specific target audience with the opportunity of getting much more engagement.
Billing is assessed on cost-per-engagement model, but Facebook gives the option to change that to be cost per click, cost per unique reach, or cost per 1,000 impressions. Twitter doesn’t give you this option, so you’ll always pay on a per-engagement basis.
Clicks to Website/Conversions
If you’re looking to drive people to your website, then here’s the campaign to check out. Facebook and Twitter have very similar implementations of this objective, with minor differences in how content is displayed and what call to actions are available in the ads.
If you want to take your clicks to website ads a step further, consider embedding a Facebook or Twitter conversion pixel on your website. Doing this is a great way to track your audience beyond just clicking to your website.
Say you have an ebook that you’ve put together and you’d like to offer it up to people when they sign up with their name and email address. This is a great place for a conversion campaign. You can use a website clicks ad to direct people to the landing page and place a pixel on the confirmation page that’s displayed after a user submits his or her information to download the ebook.
Doing this allows you to not just track how many people went to your website, but how many downloaded the ebook as a direct result of acting on your ad. This will also give a conversion rate and a cost per conversion, which will give you a better idea if it’s worth it to you to pay that amount for each conversion.
App Installs and Engagements
Social media advertising isn’t just for growing your page or boosting your posts; you can even promote your mobile app to increase installs and people’s engagement with your app if they’ve already installed it.
All you need is the link to your app from the App Store or Google Play Store and you’re ready to build your ad. Then Facebook and Twitter can promote it and get it in front of people so they can install it (or open it if they’ve already installed it), all with one click.
By running these ads, you’ll quickly get a cost per app install or cost per app engagement, so you’ll find out fast whether the spend is worth it based on your profits on the app.
Offer Claims/Leads on Twitter
This ad campaign type allows you to use the data that users have submitted into their social profiles to make acting on an offer easy. Instead of bouncing someone to a landing page to sign up for something, you can host it directly on Facebook or Twitter and have a user’s name and email automatically fill from their profile data.
By lowering the steps to entry, results can be better than a websites conversion campaign, but the information collected is not customizable.
Other stuff
There are a few other campaign types mixed between Facebook and Twitter that promote some of the platforms unique internal features. Facebook’s event response ads let you push people to sign up to go to your Facebook event and video views promote natively uploaded videos on a cost-per-view basis.
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Hurrdat is a Lincoln, Neb. digital marketing agency specializing in social media and content marketing. The company was founded in 2010 and merged with B² Interactive of Omaha, Neb. in 2014 bringing even more digital marketing specialties to both firms’ clients. Together they provide a full range of social media, SEO, and website development services to both national brands and local clients. The companies employ more than 75 people in Nebraska and have won multiple awards for their business efforts, company culture, and clients’ campaigns.
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