How to Advertise Your Business on Social Media- There’s more than one way to promote your business on social media. With just a few simple changes to your marketing plan, you can tap into some of the world’s biggest ad platforms and learn about creative ways to promote your business on social media — all for free. That pocket change we all have sitting around can go a long way with these tips on how to advertise on social media and on the different methods on how to promote business on social media.
You may already know that I’m a big fan of social media advertising. The truth is that the relationship building and the organic reach that comes from social network advertising is so much better than really any other digital advertising campaign. Social media advertising is an awesome way to promote your business on social networks for free! You can use social media as a complement or as your main channel to build an organic audience around the interests of your ideal customer.
Table of Contents
1. Choose the Right Platforms
There is no shortage of social media sites on which to share your content. The number of sites is growing every day. Sharing your content on the right platforms is crucial to your success.
When determining which channels to use, you should consider your customers and your business. It’s important that you create accounts on the platforms your target audience uses, so they can easily connect with you. Conduct some research to determine what sites your audience probably uses, and then use them too.
You should also consider which sites best fit your products. For a video production company, for example, YouTube is an obvious choice.
2. Create a Calendar
Scrambling to create posts at the last minute can lead to low-quality content. A lack of organization can lead to repeated posts or a lull in your presence on one of your channels. Creating social media content calendars can help avoid those mistakes and lead to more effective posts. Content calendars also help you create goals and strategies for meeting them, and track your progress toward them.
To make a content calendar, use a regular calendar for each social media channel and plan out your posts in advance, complete with hashtags, links, images and other content.
3. Encourage Engagement
Social media should, of course, be social. That doesn’t only apply to those who use the sites for fun. Businesses need to be interactive, too. In order to take advantage of social capability, you need to encourage interaction.
Post content that people want to read, ask questions and like, repost and comment on other users’ posts. Doing research on your audience can help you figure out what they might like.
4. Don’t Over-Promote
One trap that businesses often fall into is treating social media too much like regular advertising. You don’t want to blatantly promote yourself in every post. You need to create content that people will actually enjoy and want to see.
Promoting yourself is okay every once in a while. Some marketers go by the one-in-seven rule, which says that for every one directly promotional post, six others should be content-based. In these other six posts, you could share articles, comment on current events or ask a question. You don’t have to entirely avoid mentioning your brand in these posts; just be careful not to sell too hard.
Visual content works well on social media. Video content, especially, is ideal for grabbing people’s attention as well as conveying your personality and passion to your customers.
Visual content stands out as people scroll through their social feeds, so they’re more likely to view it and engage with it. It also allows you to say more than you could in a typical post without taking up much room. Create interesting, narrative-driven video in order to get the best reaction.
6. Address Problems Quickly
Hopefully you receive mostly positive feedback on social media. Occasionally you may encounter someone who is upset, argumentative or has something negative to say about your company.
You should carefully monitor mentions of your brand on social channels, so you can catch issues before they escalate. If you spot a problem, engage with the person by publicly apologizing if necessary and offering to solve the problem over a direct message exchange. This way, people who see the post know you were responsive but don’t have to see all the specifics of the issue.
7. Build a Community
Instead of trying to get as many followers as possible, focus on finding customers who are interested, loyal and engaged. These people are more likely to repost your content, like your posts and become customers.
When you build a community around your brand, the people within that community will engage with each other and help to promote your content. You could even try reaching out to exceptionally influential social media users and asking them to help you by reviewing a product or mentioning you in a post.
8. Provide Value
Perhaps the most important thing you can do on social media is provide value to your followers. Create something that your audience will find useful. It could be something that tells them something they didn’t know before, makes them laugh, entertains them or anything else that’s beneficial in some way.
This aspect of social media is what attracts the right customers to your business, makes people want to follow you on social sites and helps content to spread. Master this, and you’ll be a big step closer to a successful social media marketing campaign.
Facebook ads appeal to businesses of all sizes due to its low costs and expansive database. If you have a tight marketing budget and want to experiment with social ads, Facebook is one of your best options. Benefits include:
- Its large audience (approx. 2 billions users).
- One billion of these are daily active users (2 billion monthly).
- High functionality and sophistication.
- The granularity with which you can target your audience – every consumer market imaginable is on Facebook.
- You can even upload your own email list and match it across Facebook’s users and create lookalike audiences of similar people, helping you acquire similar customers more easily.
- You can evaluate the performance of your ads with Facebook Insights.
- Option to re-target your audience.
- Lots of flexibility designing your ads – they can be highly visual and align with the ways people use the network.
- The platform is constantly evolving its ads offering to reflect user behaviour, including mobile optimisation.
- Google Analytics URL tagging to track ad campaigns back to your site. This means you can see who has come to your website from your Facebook ads. You can build these URLs directly within Facebook.
- Split testing allows for refinement, making your money go further.
- You can create and save audiences and a gallery of ad images to use time and again.
How much does it cost?
You set the parameters. Two primary factors that influence the cost of your Facebook ads are your target audience and your ads’ Relevancy Score. The more desired your target audience is, the more it’s going to cost to target them above your competitors to achieve those clickthrough rates. Your Relevancy Score is based on the success of your ads. You receive a score between 1-10, which is determined by how users interact with it. It’s Facebook’s way of ensuring pay per click ads are relevant to who they’re being targeted at. The higher your score is, the less it will cost for the ad impression be delivered. Seasons and holidays can also increase your spend as competition can increase during a certain time period.
You can start with as little as £100 for a simple campaign. If your results are profitable, you can add more budget easily.
If you’re not yet advertising on Facebook, it’s definitely worth considering how to fit it into your marketing strategy.
Facebook acquired photo-sharing app Instagram in 2012, so its ads use the same system as Facebook. With 800+ million users and growing, this is another channel with strong marketing potential and can be a great fit for certain types of small businesses – eg. those in the food and hospitality industry and lifestyle-based businesses. Using the news feeds on these sites is a great way to advertise on social and you can’t waste money.
Don’t treat Instagram ads the same as Facebook ads as people use the platforms for different reasons (Facebook is used to connect with friends, articles, funny posts, etc. while Instagram is all about visually pleasing photos). It’s free and easy to set up an Instagram Business Account. Benefits include:
- Audience targeting – you can use filters to target specific people or set your ads to only show to users who mirror your current audience.
- Higher post engagement than Facebook due to less clutter on the feed – Instagram is about photos/videos, Instagram story, nothing else.
- Consumers are more likely to engage with brands on Instagram over Facebook and Twitter. Sprout Social have put together some useful insights on what makes Instagram so successful and prosperous for marketers.
- Clear tracking – Instagram’s dashboard allows you to review how many users see, click and convert after seeing your ad. This will help you refine as you move forward to increase their effectiveness.
How much does it cost?
The average cost per click is between £1-2 (costs vary widely depending on your ad type, industry and audience size). A good idea is to start small at £5/day then increase once ads are refined. After this, increase your daily budget and you increase how many people see your ad. Facebook charges businesses to run ads in exactly the same way: You decide what to spend each day/over a set time period. You choose whether to be charged back on how many users CLICK on your ad, or how many people VIEW your ad. Having the right advertising strategy is key. Use an ad manager for tighter control.
With 330 million monthly active users, Twitter is the third largest social media platform on the internet. Twitter claims 80% of its users are “affluent millennials”, with the number one reason for using the platform being “to discover something new and interesting.”
Types of Twitter ads include Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends. ‘Promoted’ means your ads show to users who don’t yet follow your Twitter account. Here’s a useful summary from Hootsuite on how to use the different Twitter ads.
How much does it cost?
There’s no minimum spend and you get to select a daily budget for your ads. Ads run on an auction system. Here’s more information from Twitter on how to set up an ad and how much it costs.
Conclusion
Social media is the place where you can promote your business cost-effectively. But first, you need to know how. If you are new to social media advertising, you should start with these very basic steps on how to advertise on social media.