Reaching Key Audiences Using Social Media Management
Social marketing is a great tool for businesses with a defined audience but who don’t yet know about the product. People often complain about information collection by Google and Facebook and many other agencies online. And it’s true that as a a pessimist, the volume of personal held by these companies could look worrying. However, using social media management can be incredibly useful to advertisers, allowing us to target very specific groups of people. A women’s cycle store can target women interesting in cycling, located within 10km of their store, between 9am and 5pm. This kind of targeting is the complete opposite of traditional advertising, where the only targeting is the approximate demographic of the readership. The Wall Street Journal for instance sells advertising as reaching “an affluent and engaged market.” It’s not exactly specific! Social media advertising is also a much more affordable way for smaller companies to advertise, with a budget of $10-$20 daily being sufficient for very targeted advertising.
Which Social Media Networks to Use
Facebook advertising is the most well known social advertising channel. With 60% of Canadians having a profile on the social network, it is the go-to network for most advertisers. To reach a younger audience, it is even more effective, with 75% of 18-34 year olds on the network. Facebook’s advertising advantage is also the wealth of information the network has on its users. It allows advertisers to target users based on age, location, education, gender, interests, career and even life events like getting married. While users of other networks often only post randomly about various subjects, Facebook users are more likely post about all aspects of their lives. Things like holidays, new jobs, cars, houses or babies are almost always posted to Facebook. Email lists and remarketing can also be used on Facebook to improve performance further.
Instagram has a much lower market share than Facebook at 16% of Canadians. However, among the 18-34 category, it’s fairly comparable with 32% active users. Since being acquired by Facebook in 2012, users can be targeted in the same way as Facebook users. The main advantage the of Instagram advertising over its rivals is the level of engagement. Users are much more likely to like or comment on branded Instagram posts compared to Facebook. This higher level of engagement allows companies to have more conversations with their customers and build relationships. The possibility of users having conversations around a brand’s product is extremely valuable, and allows brands to interact more with their users as well.
Twitter is one of the lesser-used social media marketing channels. The reason is that the user base of Twitter largely overlaps with Facebook’s. If advertisers are deciding between Facebook or Twitter advertising, Facebook is usually the network of choice. Targeting both networks is unlikely to reach many new users, instead showing ads with a higher frequency to the same users. One benefit of Twitter is that due to fewer advertisers being on the channel, users are less fatigued and more likely to engage. Twitter can also be effective at reaching users on mobile devices. The higher number of users on mobile phones means the channel can work well for promoting apps or mobile-specific products.
LinkedIn advertising reaches a different type of user from the other social media channels. The demographics are skewed toward the older, more affluent user, who tend to be white collar workers. Due to it’s more specific demographic, LinkedIn can be a useful tool to target specific job roles. While people sometimes enter their job data into other social networks, the information is often outdated. Often Facebook profiles will just say where they work, not their exact job title. This is not a problem with LinkedIn. Great results can be achieved for some products which appeal mostly to CEOs or company owners for example. LinkedIn realize this is a valuable market, so ads are often more expensive on the network.
The Importance of Social Media Management
Social media advertising tools on the different networks have all been built to be as user friendly as possible. This has been achieved in varying levels on the different networks. However, while setting up social campaigns is straightforward, running them efficiently requires more experience.
Ad fatigue
The phenomenon of users becoming less likely to interact with an ad the more they see it. If they didn’t click it the in first three times they saw it, why would they on the fifth? Combating ad fatigue is one of the primary goals of social media management. To maintain traffic from the best audiences, ads must be tested, changed and improved.
Audiences
One of the most common mistakes with social media marketing is setting up a campaign with one ad set, targeting one large audience. Sure, it works, but splitting out audiences into their constituents is the only way to improve performance. If men convert at twice the rate of women, why bid the same amount? If snowboarders spend twice as much as skateboarders, their clicks do not have the same value to the advertiser.
Tracking
To track social marketing activity effectively, ads should be tagged up using UTM codes (which I might write a short blog post on). Once these UTM codes have been implemented, Google Analytics has full visibility of social activity. Without this tracking set up, all social traffic looks the same, and paid traffic is indistinguishable from natural referrals.
If you’d like to discuss social media management or digital marketing strategy, just drop me a message!