COST OF SOCIAL MEDIA

  Social media is one of the pillar channels in digital marketing, but what makes it different from the other pillars, like search engines and email, is that it has so many platforms within it. And not in the Bing vs Google kind of way. Each platform has massive audiences that are ripe for advertising.

In other words, social media advertising is its own beast. But once tamed and harnessed, it can be used to help your business soar past its goals. Read on to learn everything you need to know to get started and succeed with social media advertising.

Social media advertising is a type of social media marketing where you use paid media to promote your business on any of its many channels. This media comes in many formats and placements and supports a range of creative, from images and video to immersive experiences.

It’s also referred to as paid social. Whereas with paid search where you target keywords and terms, on social, you target audiences, interests, and behaviors. Social media ads are also generally more visual and branded, and quite native to the platform—so much so that they can sometimes be hard to identify as ads.

 As with any PPC strategy, social media advertising has lots of benefits for businesses. Here are some reasons to advertise on social media:

• Cost-effective: PPC in general yields an average 200% ROI. In addition, paid social is a lower-cost alternative to targeting your competitors' audience on search.
• Brand awareness: Not only are social media networks vast, but also, the visual ads allow you to customize them to your branding and style.
• Engagement: In addition to ad clicks, users can interact with social media ads by liking, sharing, and commenting.
• Formats: As mentioned above, social media ads support a wide range of formats and media types
• Targeting: Because users share detailed information about themselves on the platforms, social media ads allow for granular targeting.
• Not disruptive: For the most part, social media ads are often hard to distinguish from organic posts on the platforms, making them a less disruptive way to reach your audience.

To give you a sense of how big the social media ad market is, let’s take a look at a few stats:

• Social media ads are the fourth biggest source of brand discovery and the second most popular channel for online brand research.
• Social media advertising is the second biggest market in digital ads ($153 billion in 2021), after search advertising.
• Google controls 28.6% of global digital ad spend, while Meta (Facebook) is not far behind at 23.7%

The most popular social media platforms for advertising are, unsurprisingly the same as those for organic marketing.

These include:

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Instagram
• LinkedIn

These are also popular platforms:

• TikTok
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• Quora
• Reddit

As mentioned above, while search ads operate primarily on keyword targeting, social ads are based on audience targeting. Each platform has its own features, settings, and formats, but they do share some general traits:

• Auction style: Just like the way Google Ads works, social ads are an auction-style of PPC where an algorithm determines placements and costs based on a number of criteria—including ad quality, maximum bid, and past performance.
• Campaign objectives: For most platforms, the first step in creating a campaign is to choose an objective. Usually there are three to represent top, middle, and bottom of funnel.
  • Reach/awareness
  • Leads/engagement
  • Conversion/sales
• Targeting: You’re able to target users on each platform by demographics, interests, and behaviors as well as create retargeting and lookalike audiences. Every platform is different, but this guide to Facebook audience targeting can help you get an overall grasp.
• Account structure: While naming conventions vary for each platform, each one has an account structure that allows you to organize ads into groups and then organize groups into campaigns.

How much do social media ads cost?

Now if this wasn’t a loaded question, then I don’t know what is. Ultimately, your social media ads cost will depend on a number of factors, including your campaign objective, bidding strategy, budget, campaign optimization, industry, and more. But here are some PPC metrics you’ll see with social media advertising costs:

• Cost per click (CPC)
• Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM)
• Cost per conversion/cost per action/cost per lead
• Cost per video view
• Cost per engagement (likes, comments, etc.)
• Cost per app install
• Cost per follower