Facebook is currently generating a lot of success through all areas of revenue sources, this including their successful social media advertising platform. This is directly attributed to their ability to provide online advertisers with a huge array of options for highly targeting their massive audience.
But other than Facebook, there are now other social media networks, most notably, Twitter and LinkedIn, which now also offers their sites as advertising platforms for marketers, retailers, and businesses of all backgrounds, sizes and budgets.
These three major social networking platforms are able to provide advertisers with a variety of methods to exactly pinpoint their audiences, anything from demographics, interests, likes and dislikes, marital status, gender, and exact geographic location.
But before you decide to invest your valuable advertising budget towards any of these social exchanges, it’s important that you know the various nuances which each of these platforms offer.
Twitter And “Promoted Advertising”
Twitter has experienced exponential growth in generating revenue since they’re now able to reach 1 of every 10 surfers across the connected world. What this does is it offer advertisers, who has money in hand, an extremely valuable resource. Up until recently, Twitter had reserved access to their advertising platform just for the larger major corporations who had huge budgets to spend.
But now, most likely to compete with the success of Facebook’s advertising program, Twitter has recently opened their advertising options for businesses and marketers of all sizes, shapes, and budgets. This by enabling them to freely market their goods, brands, and service through what’s known as “Promoted Accounts.”
With the Promoted Accounts program, what Twitter does is it selects users who displays similar interests to the advertiser’s followers, and will then place the Twitter handle of the businesses directly in the users’ “Who to Follow” sections.
What Twitter will also do is place the advertisers most popular tweets directly in front of a targeted audience. Both of these options are a little different from the traditional methods of attraction, as the content isn’t specifically created solely for advertising purposes.
When a business participates with Promoted Accounts and Tweets, the advertiser will only pay once someone actually begins to follows their account, or directly interacts with their tweet.
They can also determine how much that they want to spend on a daily basis on their advertising, based on per engagement action, or per new follower. The ads which they place can also be segmented geographically, which is an advantage for local businesses targeting local consumers.
Facebook Ad Display
Advertisers on Facebook have the option of choosing to use Sponsored Stories, images, or advertisements which are text based, this directly through the Facebook platform which now offers an audience of close to 1 Billion members.
What Sponsored Stories does is it increases the visibility of a particular brand’s Facebook interactions with its friends and audience. This particular method of advertising is useful in acquiring more fans, generating in-store traffic, and increasing app engagement.
What Facebook will suggest is pairing Facebook Ads with Sponsored Stories, so that the ads will encourage the users to “Like” a particular business page, while Sponsored Stories will be able to showcase the advertiser’s fans’ and their interactions a lot more prominently.
The advertisements on Facebook are able to target audiences by using options such as, gender and age, location and language, education and work, relationship status, friends, interests, and connections.
Facebook offers a CPC as well as a CPM payment model. Advertisers are also able to set up a daily expenditure budget as well as bid prices through the Facebook Ads manager, which also offers detailed reports and metrics of the ads performance.
LinkedIn The Social Business Network
If your company or product targets audiences which is geared primarily towards business professionals, then LinkedIn can prove to be a worthwhile advertising destination.
LinkedIn has more that 130 million members globally, the majority being business professionals which includes close to 8 million prominent business and industry decision makers. What LinkedIn offers is an extremely focused and dominant audience along with a variety of targeting options.
Once you’re a LinkedIn member and your profile and account is created, the ads can then be assembled, your budget established, and your target audience identified.
What the LinkedIn advertisements consist of are headlines of up to 25 characters, 75 characters of text for description, a URL section, and an 50×50-pixel image slot.
The ads are displayed directly on the profile pages, the users homepage, the LinkedIn homepage, the Group Pages, and the search results pages. You can target the ads directly towards an audience who has a certain job title, or description, a specific or specialized industry, company size or brand name, geographical location, age and gender, seniority, or through LinkedIn Groups.
LinkedIn also allows advertisers to be able to dictate their budgets, either through CPM or CPC. Using CPC enables the advertiser to be able to specify the maximum which they’re willing to spend for a particular bid.
Social Media Adverting Choices
Although all three of these social media platforms have proven positive results, it’s also becoming clear that their audiences as well as their approaches vary.
Facebook, for instance, because of their sheer size, provides the largest consumer base as well as the most targeting options. Using LinkedIn, you can cater specifically towards business professionals and corporations, while Twitter is able to offer a lot more conversation, but fewer options.