By, Golden Ashby, SFAMA Social Media Director
& Ashley Bening, SFAMA Blog Editor

Social Advertising is a rapidly growing field and it is very important to have your process defined before you embark down this new path. Fortunately, we just had Maya Grinberg from Wildfire give us a crash course to help us get started. Maya has been featured in the Huffington Post, Social Media Today, and Social Media Examiner. Maya also lives and breathes social advertising as the Social Media Manager for Wildfire Interactive. She gave us a very thorough overview of the current landscape of Social Advertising across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These Ad Networks all function quite differently and it is important to keep in mind that each network should be treated as its own social entity.

Maya explained that Facebook advertising market is probably the biggest of all the social media platforms. It has over 900 million active U.S. users who spend an average of six hours and thirty-three minutes on the site every month and 488 million of those users are on mobile. Facebook Advertising is growing exponentially and earnings grew over 23% last year.

Premium advertising is very big these days. You can now place your Ad on the Facebook newsfeed, logout screen, and the mobile newsfeed. All the chatter is about mobile advertising and social marketing teams are scrambling to come up with new and innovative ways to harness mobile.

Maya reinforced the idea that is it best to stay within the Facebook network wherever possible. Keeping the user engaged on Facebook, instead of taking them off the platform and directing them to your website or blog. Also, Facebook charges less for Ads to internal destinations. Social Ads get the best results; with branded messaging with social context leading to 68 % higher Ad recall and there is a 4 times higher of a likelihood that viewers will purchase. Maya also emphasized the enormous power in word of mouth marketing. People are much more willing to trust a brand after their friends have told them about it. She likes to refer to it as “organic scalable word of mouth”.

Planning your desired landing page is essential to your success, Maya believes. It is important to ask these questions when developing your landing page:

What happens after people click the Ad?

What traffic are you running?

What is the purpose of that traffic?

Perhaps you just want people to like your page or subscribe to your feed. Either way, these specifics need to be defined before you embark upon your new Facebook advertising adventure.

Some of the best practices for Facebook Ads include:

• Incorporate images
• People respond well when there is no dead space in the sponsored story
• Make your picture fit the sponsored story picture pixels
• As a user I want to be told “click here” to tell us about it
• Have a clear and defined Call-to-Action
• Title copy need to be concise
• Be sure to use up all of the horizontal space
• Be sure have your target market defined or you will end up wasting extensive money on your Facebook Ads
• Take advantage of the Timeline. For example, adding in the date your company was founded
• Landing pages are colossally important

The most important things to remember are to set specific goals and integrate Facebook advertising with your complete social media marketing plan.

Twitter is definitely a less mature advertising platform then Facebook. Yet, the potential of harnessing 340 million tweets per day and 140 million active Twitter users is enormous. With this many tweets every day the freshness of content is very important and users have come to expect ‘breaking news’ content. There is a good amount of engagement on Twitter, but people typically stay within their network of friends. That is why promoted accounts can really come in handy, they make it so your account will now be suggested to people as if you were a friend of a friend.

There are three kinds of Twitter Promotions:

• Promoted Tweets
• Promoted Trends
• Promoted Accounts

Twitter is chronological – you see the most recent tweets first. This is where promoted tweets can really be advantageous to your campaign. There are two types of promoted tweets, search and timeline. If you have a promoted search tweet it will make it so your tweet will show up first whenever somebody does a search on Twitter of the topics you choose for the advertisement. For a promoted timeline tweet Maya advises to pay for a promoted tweet that shows up first – landing on other individuals’ timelines. This helps you by promoting your content and goes right to the timeline of your followers or followers like your followers. This is only good for 24 hours, so it is useful to take down the promoted tweet after 24 hours and repost the tweet to maximize exposure.

Maya describes another creative application of “promoted tweets”. She recommends hyper targeting anything that is trending at the moment. What does that do for you? It is smart to run your Twitter advertising against popular trending topics to achieve higher ROI. As with the other social platforms, it is important to remember Twitter should never be your sole source of marketing. It is just one part of your social marketing plan.

With promoted trends it is important to remember that promoted trends cost more to advertise and they require a Twitter Ad Representative. Promoted trends hashtags cost $140,000 for 24 hours, so it seems only big companies with expansive marketing budgets are able to take advantage of this twitter advertising.

The promoted account is featured in search results and within the Who To Follow section. Promoted account campaigns can be geo-targeted and can cost lots of money to implement.

Social advertising for Twitter is just getting its feet wet and it will be interesting to see the changes that come in the future.

LinkedIn is commonly known as the ‘professional’ network and is the least developed Ad platform of the three we are discussing. It is naturally quite active with 150 million active members in 200 countries and it is also active internationally. According to LinkedIn the network is made up of more high-income earners, business decision makers and college educated professionals than other leading networks. Since engagement on LinkedIn is comparatively low, you should target your adverting very carefully and brevity is the key to success.

Be sure to maximize your presence on LinkedIn and maximize effectiveness. Smaller advertisements that are very clean and minimal seem work better on LinkedIn. You should always have an attractive, catchy headline, with action verbs, that targets a specific kind of person in order to engage and maximize the effectiveness of a smaller Ad. Last but not least, it is important to remember link your title and copy to your target audience and that the best times to post your Ad on LinkedIn is during business hours, earlier in the week.

I think we all learned that advertising and engagement between these different social media networks are very different and you should carefully consider the dynamics of each network to ensure you get the most “bang for your buck”. Strong content, imagery, targeting, and calls-to-actions are universally important on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but how you share your brand on these three networks is very different.

Last, but not least, it is important to define the purpose of your advertisement, and to always have a plan for what users are going to do next after they click on the Ad. For the complete Wildfire Social Advertising Best Practices Guide, click here.

We hope you found this article useful and have a better understanding on how to utilize the different Ad networks. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Picture Credit: Wildfire