Introduction to Paid Social

One of the fastest growing marketing channels specified by Chaffey is social media marketing. Not to be confused with owned social media content, Paid Social refers to any form of digital marketing on social media where a business pays for their advert placement. Using a variety of algorithms and targeting processes, the goal of paid social is to cut through the noise of an overcrowded social media feed and reach your specific target audience.

Of course to reach this goal, some serious strategic planning is essential. Unbounce explain how many businesses make the same school-boy errors. Testing several elements at once can leave you unsure what worked and what failed miserably. Consequently, this will leave you (or more likely senior staff with less of a handle on social media) more hesitant to try it again because the success and valued added is unclear. Sprinklr have written a guide that explains everything you need to know about paid social, that is definitely worth looking into.

The Downside

Although paid social means more people will see your content, due to the advertising laws all promoted posts must have “Sponsored” or “Promoted” on them to notify the consumer that what they are seeing is an advert.

It is good to be aware that most consumers do not want to see adverts as it affects their user experience no matter how good the content. People may automatically create a negative association with your brand if they view it as a disturbance to their social media experience. Blogs such as this one express their dissatisfaction with the strategy.

What to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of you paid social campaigns:

1.       Is your content making an impact?

The (arguably) most important rule is that your content needs to stand out. It’s not worth paying to boost a post that will blend into the consumers timeline. This is highlighted in the following Econsultancy blog. The content and accompanying landing page should be engaging and use striking imagery/media and language but should suit the platform it will feature on. The performance of your content will be determined by the level of engagement (Facebook, 2017). This measures the % of people that your post reached who actually engaged with it eg. Instagram will be comments, likes and saves, whereas on Facebook it will be reactions, comments, shares and link clicks (if there is a link to follow).

The higher your engagement, the bigger impression your content is making and building your brand. To improve it, it’s worth experimenting with creative to work out exactly what performs best, and regularly refreshing your content to keep your audience from getting bored. Which is easier said than done considering humans now apparently have a shorter attention span than a goldfish (Telegraph, 2015).

2.       Have you chosen the right platforms for your product/service?

Each social media platform is different, to be able to reach specific objectives and audiences, all social platforms and the emerging networks must be researched. The best way to know if you are using the right one is to define your target audience and compare to the platform statistics, the demographics of the people engaging with your posts. For example Pinterest is often overlooked by businesses, however it has been shown that 87% of users make purchases due to the influence of the network, but 81% of the users are female, so this must be the relevant audience for your specific brand (Omnicore, 2017).

This article by Accion gives a good step by step guide to help pick the right platforms.

 

3.       How can you tell if your bidding on the right content?

After putting money behind your ads and posts bids must be regularly changed in relation to performance. This can be seen by looking at the analytics pages which will show you your engagement per post, how many followers you have gained or lost from each post, how many image or profile clicks you received per post and many more factors. Clearly the higher engagement or higher click-through rate posts will be the ones you want to re-bid on. On a small scale this can be kept track of manually however automated re-bidding can be set up if your campaigns are larger. It is also just as important to cancel spending on campaigns that are under-performing. Best to let content go if it does not achieve results rather than continue to waste money on them. If done correctly, accurate bidding can help maximise results without increasing spend (PerformanceIN, 2017).

4.       How do you know if you are targeting wisely?

By targeting the right people, you can save budget by avoiding spending money for ads to be seen by groups who are not relevant. Paid social allows for amazingly specific segmentation and targeting. You can ensure you are targeting the right people by selecting filters that can be based on demographic information such as gender, age or location or on more personal qualities such as interests or pages liked and many other very specific ways explained in the following Wordstream blog. By displaying content tailored to user’s interest you will also improve your engagement, and this consequently improves the performance of the post.

Below is an example of some good paid social targeting from IdealFit UK. They have clearly targeted me due to my gender, the fact that I follow many fitness pages (note the personable caption “for women, just like you!”) and most likely my age group due to the fitness craze amongst millennials.

Get Started!

Each social media platform has its own detailed and useful tutorial on how to build your own campaign, you can find them here: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.