Should I Be Advertising On Social Media

Social media advertising is a must if you’re looking to reach a new, targeted audience and fast.

With organic reach more competitive than ever on all of the social media platforms, the only real way to stay ahead of the game is by advertising. Organic reach has been on a steady decline for some time now, thanks to a shift in the algorithm, but if you ‘pay to play,’ you’ll find that this will actually improve your organic reach over time.

Of course, it can be scary moving from a free organic social strategy to putting money on the table. So, it’s always important to understand the options and ensure your social media advertising strategy is right for your business and that you’re not just throwing money away.

One of the areas we specialise in at Social Soda is social media advertising and when we have conversations with clients, old and new, they often ask us “should I be spending money on advertising?” If you’re looking for real results on social media, the answer, of course is “YES”!

Now, we understand how complicated social media advertising can be (we’ve invested a lot of time and money in ensuring we know exactly how it works) that is why over our next two blogs we’re going to talk about Facebook advertising, to give you a better understanding as to why we think you should invest money in it and also give you an overview of the types of adverts you can run.

Let’s start off with our TOP 5 REASONS why we think you should go ahead and advertise on Facebook.

Reason 1

It’s highly effective and we have the results to prove this!

Without blowing our own trumpet, all our clients that have gone with an advertising package, have seen good results. That’s because we understand the advertising process and know how to tweak campaigns to make them work.

It’s very important, that if you’re starting out with advertising, you understand the basic process, to run successful campaigns. If you don’t know what you’re doing and decide to just ‘wing’ it, it could end up costing you a lot of money. This is what we want to avoid.

Ok, so not every single campaign you run will work first time. What you have to remember is that it’s a marathon and not a sprint and it can take time for campaigns to run and results to come through. We’ll explain more about this in our next blog.

Reason 2

You can reach your perfect audience.

Well, this is a no brainer really! Facebook’s audience is wide. By using their advertising abilities, you can target people on gender, age, location, job title, job industry and interests, so you’re really hitting the right people with your advertising.

If this isn’t a good enough reason to start Facebook advertising, you better read on!

Reason 3

Facebook ads are affordable.

Advertising on Facebook essentially can be cheaper than advertising elsewhere. Adverts in magazines, newspapers and television are very costly and if you get the advert wrong the first time you have to spend much more money to get it right.

With Facebook adverts, you can limit how much you want to spend, and you can amend and adapt campaigns as they run, so you’re only running (and spending money on) your most effective adverts.

Reason 4

You can customise your ad campaigns.

Not all campaigns you run will be the same. The world is your oyster when it comes to Facebook advertising and there is a whole plethora of ads you can choose.

You can choose to run a web traffic advert, a brand awareness advert, a conversion advert, an engagement advert, the list is endless… Then you can choose to run it as a carousel, a single image, a video, a slideshow…Plus you can amend the text for each advert you run, so you’re not having to run with the same ad copy each time. Sounds interesting right?

Reason 5

Facebook is always updating ad features.

The platform is always evolving and continues to add more features and improve the user experience for both advertisers and normal Facebook users.

This is great news. This means that Facebook are really invested with advertising and it also means that the successful adverts you’re running now, could be ten times more successful in the future, as more new features are added.

So, in a nutshell, advertising on Facebook is cost effective and a great way to get results. It’s also easy to do, once you’ve got to grips with it. We won’t lie, there are some complex adverts out there, which will blow your mind, but there are also some really quick and easy adverts that you can set up, to get the ball rolling. The quicker you get on board, the sooner you’ll unlock its full potential.

Here at Social Soda we understand how unnerving setting up your first campaign can be and it’s quite easy to be put off, just by looking at the advertising tools involved including Facebook Business Manager. That’s why we recommend spending some time understanding the process of creating an advert, so that when you do run your first one, you get the most out of it.

But, it’s also important to remember that if you’re first campaign doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world!

If you don’t have the time to learn or you feel this is just too technical for you, why not consider outsourcing your social media advertising to an external agency, who have all the tools, time and tricks to get your campaigns up and running?

We appreciate that this may all appear quite daunting and that in today’s economic climate, money is precious; that’s why we’re doing splitting this blog into two parts. So, you can really decide whether Facebook advertising is the right route for you.

Coming soon: ‘Let’s Talk About Facebook Advertising’. In this blog we’ll guide you through the three most popular adverts: Brand Awareness, Engagement and Conversion and give you a brief overview of how they work. We’ll also throw in some examples!

If you’re interested in Facebook advertising, but the very thought of starting a campaign fills you with dread, why not get in touch with? Contact us at hello@socialsoda.co.uk and let us see if we can help you on your social media advertising journey.