Social media marketing has become increasingly competitive and challenging within just this year. While it is still possible to drive organic engagement on social media, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become much more savvy about how to best leverage the massive amount of potential their reach offers. This means that in order for your brand to stay ahead of the competition, you have to utilize social media advertising to ensure that your message reaches a high number of your target audience.
Twitter Marketing
Moving into next year, marketers will have an incredible opportunity to reach their audiences via Twitter's new Promoted Moments. This native ad product, like others of its type, is designed to deliver advertising promotions that resemble other content so that users don't quickly scroll past them due to their frustrations over being bombarded with advertisements. Promoted Moments fits in nicely with Twitter's growing arsenal of native advertising products, including Promoted Tweets. The primary difference between Promoted Tweets and Promoted Moments is that the latter allows marketers to include more videos, photos, and tweet content. Twitter, which is facing challenges in maintaining revenue growth, is banking on the ability of the new feature to extend the platform's reach to more users - a challenge that this social media channel and marketers have been experiencing for a long time.
What do you need to know to make Promoted Moments work for your brand? Keep in mind that Twitter's targeting this feature toward new users. Furthermore, it's meant to have a journalistic look and feel. The idea is to promote a comprehensive story. To get the most leverage from this option, you'll need to put some work into it. There are no shortcuts with this one, but the payoff can be tremendous.
Facebook Marketing
Last year, Facebook reach began declining steadily, largely due to algorithm changes the social media platform instituted. Unfortunately, brands that are new to marketing on Facebook often make the mistake of thinking that most of their fans see their content, when in reality, that's not the case. In fact, 70% of companies surveyed about using Facebook for marketing have experienced a decline in organic reach by at least 30%.
Like it or not, your brand will have to play the paid promotion game in order to stay ahead of the competition. Facebook's heavily discouraging practices such as asking fans to complete a specific action - usually to hit the 'Like' button - in order to view content. Facebook ads give you the opportunity to overcome the restrictions of organic reach while precisely targeting the demographics you want to reach. The key to making this strategy work is building upon existing content with quality engagement by promoting the post using an ad specifically targeting friends of your fans.
Facebook offers three types of ads:
- Promoted Pages
- Promoted websites
- Boosted posts
Which type of ad you choose depends on your end goal - for instance, if you're interested in increasing traffic to your Facebook page, a promoted Page would be the best option. Promoted websites help to drive traffic to your website. Boosted posts are a great way to increase the reach of a particular post. Furthermore, promoted posts can be highly effective for marketing special promotions and events - keep in mind, however, that since this type of social media advertising only connects you to the friends of your followers, it's important to carefully evaluate your own follower base.
One benefit of Facebook advertising is that it allows you to target the platform's 1.5 billion users in a variety of ways. For instance, users can be targeted based on specific location, gender, education, age and relationship status. Even better, Facebook allows marketers to target users based on Likes, interests, and hobbies. Since behavior is a vital element of social media interactions, marketers can also take advantage of the opportunity to target marketing campaigns based on user behaviors. By using such targeting techniques, marketers can create extremely well-defined advertising campaigns that specifically pinpoint the users they wish to reach.
As social media marketing continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, brands will need to rely more heavily on promoted marketing in order to remain effective.
This post originally appeared on the Launch & Hustle blog. Main image via Shutterstock.