Many believe that social media advertising is a revolution in the world of marketing and this is supported by the results of various advertising expenditure studies.  The budget for social advertising is growing exponentially - BIA/Kelsey predicts that it would hit $8.3B by 2015.  As more and more folks get glued on their social networking sites, the potential of social media advertising with its viral sharing options, unlimited worldwide reach and accessibility is becoming more appealing for companies to include it in their marketing strategy.

Tips on creating a social media advertising campaign

You could get easily overwhelmed with social media – there are just too many options and the possibilities seemed endless.  To come up with an effective social media campaign, there are 4 important things you must consider: your target audience; your competition; your value proposition; and the message you want to share with your target audience. Let’s discuss each item and why it’s important in social media advertising -

- Your Target Audience – One of the most significant advantage of social media advertising is that you can directly interact with audience real time so it’s important to be in the right place and time. You need to research which social media platforms you would be best able to reach your target audience and what’s the culture of that particular social media channel. This way you can tailor your social advertising that would best engage your target market.

- Your Competition – it’s important to know your rival’s online involvement.  You need to understand their online advertising strategy and their overall online presence. You also need to note their participation in social media advertising, pay per click advertising and in terms of organic search results, how noticeable they are.

- Define your brand/business value – you must define the reasons why your target audience should advocate your brand and choose you over your competitors.  Thrugh social media, you have an advantage as you can get the information from your target market very quickly.

- Your Message – Knowing the value you can bring to the market would only matter if you are able to effectively communicate it to your target audience. Understand advertising options of each social media platform and choose which would best suit your social media campaign. You also need to come up with content for your social media that would be engaging so it should be helpful information but still interesting or entertaining.

Facebook Advertising

Of all social media platforms, Facebook advertising is currently the most developed and widely used. It offers a self-serve platform and it’s available for even the smallest business with limited advertising budget. It’s simple, provides specific demographic and interest level of your target audience, and cost effective compared to other online advertising platforms such as Google Adwords. Facebook advertising costs would ultimately depend on you – you can set and adjust your daily budget as you wish. You also can choose to pay only when people see (CPM – per one thousand impressions) or click your ad (CPC).

With Facebook, your ad can appear on the right-hand column of pages in Facebook. It can appear on any different types of pages including home page, photos, groups, apps, pages and profiles. The content of your Facebook ad can sometimes appear with news about social actions that your friends have taken such as liking your page. Depending on the applicable privacy settings you’ve set on your account, your confirmed friends may also see news about the social actions you have done in your Facebook Ads. You can run your ads continuously or on specific dates, depending on your over-all campaign objectives. You can change your advertising schedule at any time through the Ads Manager.
Here are some of suggested best practices when creating a Facebook advertising campaign:

- Define your advertising goals
- Identify your target audience and keywords that would drive best results
- Make your brand stand out
- Keep your ads simple but use a strong call to action
- Make use of images
- If a user clicks on your ad, it should route the user to the most relevant landing page – the one that would provide helpful information about your brand
- Keep your ads attractive, informative and user friendly as much as possible
- Evaluate your Facebook advertising campaign

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