Marketing Opportunities on Popular Social Media Platforms Explained

If your business isn’t utilizing social media platforms, chances are it will soon be labeled extinct. For your business page to be useful and popular, you’ll need to explore advertising options, what each platform offers, and how use them wisely.

The beginning is difficult — when you’re not familiar with ads on social platforms, they look like rocket science. However, they’re quite useful and simple to use — you only need to know what you’re doing.

With simple theoretical knowledge about marketing options on popular social media platforms, you’ll be able to successfully create and publish your first campaign.

Facebook

The first platform on the list is Facebook, for obvious reasons — it has over 2 billion users. With these numbers and precise demographics, it’s impossible not to reach your target audience. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a small business or a corporate titan — Facebook ad options work well in both of these cases.

However, considering their numerous options, it can be a challenge to those with no previous expertise in the niche to get started with Facebook marketing. You should explore all of your options so you can understand which one is most suited to your content. So, here they are.

• Advertise your app.

Every serious business has their own app. This portal enables your audience to get in direct contact with you and your support system, so if you still don’t have one, now is the right time to do it; the future lies in apps.

Facebook offers special options for app promotion. With their tools, you’ll be able to get your app out there, focus on the group of people who already have interest in it or are in need of it, and supply the market with another portal to access your products or services.

• Promote your brand.

Brand building is an important step in the development of every business; you need to put yourself on the map and make your brand colors recognizable. Although this process takes time, Facebook can make it simpler.

Because of specified demographics, you’ll be able to pick your audience based on their field of interest — even a particular movie, if that’s what you find relevant — present your brand, and of course, your offer.

• Increase conversions.

Furthermore, Facebook supplies its advertisers with special tools to increase the number of sales. Considering the fact that your audience is just a couple of clicks away, it takes several minutes for you to present them with a new discount or a new product.

• Popularize your page.

When developing a Facebook advertising strategy, you should have in mind it’s quite important that you invest your money into making a page that’s self-sustainable. Your goal should be to pay for ads and different tools so that you can gather your audience in one place and so that their response to your posts is natural.

This will be possible if you invest a part of your efforts into getting more page likes, post likes and shares – another thing that Facebook can do for you.

• Convert leads.

Once you create a functioning business model and a circle of loyal customers that keep returning, you should set another goal and find ways to expand your business.

Obviously, the answer here lies in converting leads. Facebook also offers tools to select your audience for an ad based on whether or not they liked your page. In order to reach a stage of expansion, you should target those who are yet unfamiliar with your brand.

This is the first step of hunting leads which you can convert into customers accordingly. Naturally, this is a procedure you should repeat whenever your office gets into a stage of stagnation.

• Make sales catalogues.

Since recently, Facebook found a way for businesses to promote their offer without creating messy posts which are difficult to navigate and you must have encountered them lately – slideshows. They are a very effective solution that subtly promotes your offer without taking too much space on the News Feed.

• Encourage store visits.

In order to increase the number of sales, you can use action tools that Facebook offers and directly connect your audience with your store pages on both – apps and websites.

Whether you use these tools for the purpose of presenting novelties in your proposal or you just want to increase the number of sales, you can be sure that your posts will reach the right audience and you’ll be able to see a significant increment in sales.

• Advertise videos.

Whether it’s because the quality of videos reached a new level or because other types of content became old news in the meantime, videos are in the spotlight right now.

Each day, over eight billion videos are viewed online. Even though 86% of them are being muted, this number is still quite impressive. This explosion of video popularity happened somewhere between 2014 and 2015, and especially on US territory where the number of posted videos increased by over 90%.

If you want to advertise on Facebook and stay on track with the current trends, videos are your best shot. And, it’s no surprise that this social platform offers many options when it comes to video advertising.

If you’re still in doubt, you should pay attention to how much the Facebook team is investing into video content – they are giving more than $50 million to celebrities, influencers, etc. to post videos and go live.

Twitter

Advertising on this social media platform is quite simple. You need to select what you want promoted, pick out the preferred payment option, and voila – one more approval click and your add is out there. But, why use Twitter?

Twitter users are all about information; they want to know everything without wasting any time on long articles or videos – anything that exceeds the upper limit of characters on Twitter.

The value of Twitter lies in the possibility that your tweet might go viral – and whether you’re trying to become an influencer or you want to make your brand stronger, going viral is always a very nice boost. You can significantly increase your chances if you use their advertising options.

• Advertise your account.

However, first thing’s first – your account needs to be on the map and the only way to do this is to gather more followers. By advertising your account, you’ll be able to reach your audience and show up on lists of suggested results.

Before you do anything else, you should dedicate your time to building a strong account. Also, you should make sure that your followers are relevant – following random pages won’t do you much good now or in the future.

• Promote tweets.

Once you reach a satisfactory number of followers, you should popularize your account. Because Twitter offers tools to promote your tweets, this is highly plausible. You should first learn how to make the best of your tweets.

However, there’s a timeline of actions that you should take into account. In order to promote a tweet, you primarily need to post it; afterwards you can boost it by using Twitter tools and selecting the option you find most suitable.

• Popularize trends.

Influencers are what matters on Twitter. Similar to what we discussed regarding Facebook, you should direct your efforts towards creating a self-sustainable account; for that to happen, you need to create attractive tweets, reach the right audience and – become a trendsetter.

Another option for advertising on Twitter is about making trends popular. This can be quite beneficial to your cause because they can enable you to attract a large mass to your page, promote events, or build your brand.

• Set up a campaign.

Finally, you can use this social media platform to develop a marketing campaign. With this knowledge of Twitter, you can use its advertising tools to target your audience, popularize your account, and make your posts go viral. Remember that consistency is quite important and you’ll be able to see good results very soon.

Instagram

Although it has four times less users than Facebook, the number of Instagram lovers is still impressive – there are over five hundred million active accounts on this social media platform. Instagram is a platform like no other; everything about it is visual – you can rarely see letters unless they are hashtags.

So, what makes Instagram so special? Well, sponsored posts are barely any different than the regular ones. So, chances are that a potential customer of yours won’t care too much for the fact you’re actually trying to sell them something – which is a problem on social platforms today because users are swamped with ads.

Because Instagram was collected by Facebook in 2012, you will need a profile on their platform so that you can actually publish ads. However, this is good news for you if you used Facebook tools for advertising before because the procedure is quite similar.

First of all, you will need to decide whether you want to use Ads Manager, Power Editor, or Facebook Ads API for your advertising. Your decision should be based on the number of ads you plan on publishing as well as the size of your company.

For those of you who want to conduct a serious campaign, you should go with Power Editor. On the other hand, for something more casual, you should go with Ads Manager. The Facebook Ads API is somewhere in between.

The following step is choosing the purpose of your marketing. You can either:

• Direct people to your website.

• Increase the number of sales.

• Popularize your posts.

• Promote your app.

• Make video ads.

Afterwards, you should target your audience so that you can reach those who are already interested in what you have to offer. There are various types of demographics – language, location, gender, interests, education, relationships, and language are just some of them.

Once you decided on the characteristics of your target audience, you should pay special attention to the next window you’ll see. It will showcase different platforms – mobile news feed, Instagram, audience network, desktop news feed, and desktop right column. Naturally, you should select Instagram only.

Afterwards you should decide on a budget. You can choose between daily ads and those that run for a certain period of time. This choice should also depend on the quality of your ad and how it fits into the overall marketing campaign.

Snapchat

The popularity of Snapchat has skyrocketed; it’s quite surprising that a social media platform can develop so quickly. It’s all because of the temporary content – people find it more comfortable to publish posts which aren’t set in stone.

So, Snapchat is definitely one of the places to be in if you want to keep up with the current trends. But first, you should learn about your options on this platform.

• Discover

This is a viral tab – it shows trending stories, popular topics, and big happenings. So, if you want to be noticed, publishing your ad here will definitely do the trick.

• Lenses

If you want to know how politicians, movies, and series projects are being advertised on Snapchat, you should explore lenses. Although they are the most expensive advertising option, they are also the most efficient one.

• Nationwide Lenses

McDonald’s already used this option although it’s relatively new – you can turn your face into their French fries box. The obvious advantage of this option is that it’s spread across the whole country, so you get to reach a significantly wider audience.

• Filters and Codes

By scanning the Snapchat code, you can gain access to a line of new options which are special offers, limited editions, etc. This is another new but a very promising feature.

• Geofilters

Quite efficient and affordable, geofilters on Snapchat can enable you to access specific locations, like venues or city districts, and thus attack a narrow field and get to your target audience quickly. The pricing depends on the size of the area you choose – the larger the radius, the more expensive it will be.

• Snap Ads

Via Snap Ads, you can post a video that lasts up to ten seconds. Your ad will be published on the Discovery tab, and users will also be able to swipe up from more content.

LinkedIn

Many LinkedIn users complain about the ad features of this social media platform because they seem to be too complicated once you first take a look at them. However, they are quite simple if you know what a certain option is in reference to.

First of all, you need to know that you can choose between text ads and sponsored updates – in order to build any of these ads, you’ll have to visit the LinkedIn Campaign manager. When it comes to sponsored posts, it will be required from you to select between sponsoring an old post or starting from scratch. If you want to advertise something that’s already published, you should know you won’t be able to make any edits.

So, you can publish sponsored content, your profile needs to be connected to the page of your company or showcase page. It’s different with text ads – you can post them from your personal account, but it can also be via a company or showcase page.

After you fill in the boxes – which is a quite user friendly process – you should move on to targeting. You should begin with determining the location, and then move on to specifics, such as:

• company size,

• job title, function, or seniority,

• education,

• members within LinkedIn groups,

• age, etc.

LinkedIn targeting options will provide you with nice control over who gets to see your ad, which will increase its success rate.

Finally, you should determine your budget and this window will provide you with two options – to pay per click or per impression. LinkedIn also provides tools for analytics which you should definitely use in order to find out how your ads are doing and what you can do to improve the following ones.

So, marketing opportunities on popular social platforms are definitely not rocket science – they are actually a gold mine for businesses. Once you dig deeper into the world of ads and start using all options social networks provide, you’ll be hungry for more of them. The more specifics there are, the better you’ll be able to build your ads.

If you are consistent and, if you keep yourself updated about the novelties on the subject, it’s certain that you will be able to see positive changes in conversions, and the number of your customers, likes, and followers. The social networks listed above offer an instrument for business expansion and you should use their full potential.