What Is Paid Social Advertising?

Paid Social Advertising is the process of creating advertisements that are embedded within the social space. Whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or YouTube, paid social advertising helps you achieve your business goals and objectives.

Why Do I have to Pay?

A few years ago, you could leverage social media to collect our fans on brand pages and continue to engage with them with your posts. However, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter decided to minimize the reach of organic posts (posts without advertising dollars). This is how they make money.

Prior to 2012, businesses were able to reach so many fans with organic posts on Facebook. Research from Social@Ogilvy has suggested that some brand pages reach as low as 2% of a brand’s fans.

What Type of Ads Can You Create?

Each social platform has a unique set of ad products. Here’s a list of some of the many ad types offered on each platform.

How Much Do They Cost?

The beautiful thing about paid social advertising is that it is an affordable advertising option when compared to other forms of advertising. Signs, posters, billboards, radio are all traditional ways of advertising, however, they can be expensive and you may never be able to fully measure your return on investment without conducting a marketing survey.

With paid social advertising, you can monitor your spending and analytics in real-time. You also have the ability to adjust your spending during your campaign.

Instead of asking yourself, how much does it cost, the better question is how much is in your budget? Once you have an allocated a budget each month, you will have a better idea on how much you will need to pay to achieve specific goals.

Paid Social Advertising is a bidding system. You are bidding against other businesses who are also bidding on similar targets, so you the amount of spend will always from one campaign to the next.

Here are a couple of ways in which your business can be charged across different platforms:

• Link Clicks – Cost Per Click (CPC)
• Impressions – Cost per 1 Million Impressions (CPM)
• Engagements – Cost per Engagement (CPE)
• Video Views – Cost Per View (CPV)

To give an example of how this may work, if you buy your ad on a cost-per-click, you can pay as low as $0.30 for a click or it can be as expensive as $5.00 per click depending on how many other advertisers are buying your specific target. There are multiple ways to bid on each social platform and multiple variables that effect cost.

How Can You Target?

Each social platform has unique capabilities when it comes to targeting your customers. However, as competition increases, their targeting options begin to look similar and similar. The wonderful thing about paid social advertising is the ability to laser target. After, paid social advertising has better targeting capabilities than a TV spot!

Here are a list of ways you can target on each social platform:

Let’s make this simple, shall we? You’re a local Mexican restaurant. With Facebook, you can laser target your customer with the following parameters:

• Males
• Bilingual Hispanics
• 25-45 years of age
• 10 Mile Radius of your city
• Interested In: Food & Beverage, Mexican Cuisine
• With the behavior of eating out often

You can even create separate campaigns that can re-target people who visited your website!

Learn more about paid social advertising here: https://www.keensocial.com/social-advertising-paid-social/