Best Practices: Advertising on social media

Is your business ready for the 2022 holiday rush?

Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter provide small business owners with excellent ways to execute paid advertising campaigns. Here’s a quick list of digital advertising “best practices” your business should be sure to follow if you’re just starting to wade into the waters of social media advertising campaigns.

Know your Objective

One of the biggest mistakes companies make when getting started in social advertising is throwing a lot of money at a lot of ads on a lot of platforms, without really taking the time to first identify their objective. Are you trying to drive traffic to your website? Or are you trying to gain more signups for your email list? Are you selling products? Or does your business provide a service? All of these questions will change the type of campaign you setup within your chosen social media platforms.

Another area to identify when narrowing in on your objectives is to select the proper social media channels — not everything that will resonate with an audience on Facebook is going to be best suited for Twitter. Without taking the time to analyze the pro’s and con’s of each platform’s advertising capabilities, you could be throwing money away.

Identify your Audience

You don’t necessarily need to spend “big money” in social media advertising to get your desired results. Utilizing customer data and current social audience data, identify your key demographic and their interests, purchase behaviors and more using your chosen social media platform’s advertising dashboards. Facebook, for example, will let you narrow your audience down to not only geographical locations, but specific interests — like other pages, publications or products on the platform.

By identifying your audience early, you can help reduce the amount of “wasted” money spent on those that may not convert, instead targeting an audience that is highly likely to follow through on your desired objective.

Keep it Short, Focus on Visual

No matter the social platform, the emphasis has shifted from text to organic, engaging content. For Facebook and Instagram specifically, it is important that your organic posts keep the text to a minimum. When posting to these platforms, make sure you’re keeping your text to a minimum of 1-3 sentences, at most. Also, avoid using links in the text, when possible on Facebook (you should NEVER use links in text on Instagram), instead using the link preview that Facebook provides.

You should also, if possible, try to utilize high-quality video (over images) when creating your ads. Social posts containing video see over 48% more engagement and interaction, with a share rate of 12x that of generic text and/or static image posts. However, if video isn’t readily available, be sure the imagery you are using is high-quality, and relevant to the ads themselves.

At times like this, SmartSolutions understands that managing the current state of your company in the midst of a global pandemic can be a massive undertaking. Contact our team today to get your free consultation!

Every company has a story — and at SmartSolutions, we’re passionate about helping you tell that story.