Last Updated on March 13, 2019 by Santhosh Muralidhar

Social media advertising is an integral part of digital advertising. One of the greatest advantages of social media advertising is that it helps brands to show their promo messages by targeting a relevant audience. The best social media advertising strategy will always focus on achieving the business objectives and goals. In the past 4 years, there has been a significant rise in social media advertising costs. Because of this, there is a good scope for brands to optimize & leverage innovative tactics to lower down the cost & increase the results by advertising using social media. According to social media advertising statistics, over 2 million businesses are promoting their business through Facebook Ads. Some of the prominent social media advertising platforms are Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads, Linkedin Ads, Quora Ads, Pinterest Ads and more.

Many Businesses have been able to reap social media advertising benefits by developing a performance-driven & effective social media marketing strategy.

Through a proper social media marketing plan & strategy, social media advertising effectiveness can be impacted by even a small hyperlocal business as well.

To be frank it doesn’t matter if it’s a large brand or a small business in order to succeed in social media advertising. All that matters is a plan and a strategy.

social media advertising examples include brands and businesses running promo campaigns to increase follower base, increase engagements, enhance conversion rates, build brand awareness and more.

As per reports around 71% of people who had a positive experience with a brand or a business are likely to recommend the same in their friends & relatives network.

What are the unique social media advertising statistics about each & every social media advertising platforms?

Before jumping into how social media advertising can help in getting good results, let’s take a look at some of the interesting stats and facts about the various social media advertising platforms.

Facebook Ads:

FB Ads are the biggest social media advertising platform.

Facebook advertising sawed a rapid growth of 49% in 2018 in terms of advertising spend. In fact, video advertising on facebook sawed an impressive growth of 12% in 2018.

The total advertising spend of advertisers on Facebook stood at around 49 billion dollars for 2018.

It is estimated that there around 1.87 billion people who watch videos on Facebook. Video advertising campaigns received higher engagements than Ad campaigns with just Images & texts.

So, this definitely is a signal to brands that video advertising should compulsorily leverage in their marketing campaigns.

On top of that According to reports, Facebook Live video broadcasts achieved six times higher engagements than other types of video content.

As per studies, Facebook has the most diverse range of audiences than any other social media platform. It is the most widely used social media platform among 79% of American internet subscribers.

More than 50% of Facebook users in the USA say that they are seeing relevant Product Ads or Service Ad promo’s in their news feed.

And According to the studies conducted, Facebook users are actually highly interested in knowing about those products that are being advertised to them on Facebook.

As per the reports, it is estimated that there are around 50 million Facebook business pages.

Brands have been leveraging facebook messenger & messenger ads to lower down their social media advertising costs.

Facebook Ads offers a variety of targeting methods like demographic targeting, interest targeting, behavioral targeting, location targeting and so on.

Also, it offers advanced targeting methods like custom audience targeting, Look-alike audience and more.

Also, Facebook ads offer a wide range of Ad formats. This also helps Facebook marketers to get their promo in front of their targeted audience.

Twitter Ads:

Perhaps the most interesting statistics surrounding Twitter Ads is this one. A report from a survey that sawed 65% of the Twitter user’s participation, revealed that 90% of the people would have a plan to purchase a service or a product from the brand that they follow on Twitter.

Also, Twitter Ads have higher engagement than any other social media advertising platform.

Also just like Facebook Ads, Video Advertising is rocking on Twitter Ads. As per reports video advertising saw a massive increase of 221% on Twitter in 2018.

Tweets with images saw an impressive 18% higher engagements than other forms of tweets.

Thus, Twitter Ads have high engagement rates. Hence Twitter ads are seen as a very promising marketing platform across marketers at the global level.

Twitter is one platform that is highly open. Mainly twitter is known famously for Its hashtags.

By using relevant hashtags social media marketers can get their tweets across a high number of people in their target segment of the audience.

Snapchat Ads:

Snapchat is one platform that has a lot of millennials and teenagers. As per the reports Snapchat video advertising has 1.5 times higher command than facebook video advertising. Snapchat video ads have two times higher purchase intent from users as compared with youtube & facebook video ads.

Linkedin Ads:

It is estimated that around 1 million people on Linkedin publish a well written long-form content every week. As per the reports around 40% of the Linkedin, users have subscribed to the Linkedin Premium feature.

Recently Linkedin announced that the Account targeting feature & Audience targeting feature would be enabled to all Linkedin advertisers.

According to the reports, 95% of B2B Marketers use Linkedin to do content marketing. Although Linkedin video advertising is highly effective only 38% of the marketers are leveraging video advertising on LinkedIn.

Posts with images on Linkedin get 98% higher engagement than other forms of Linkedin posts.

Also, Linkedin is known to be a platform filled with lots of professionals.

Instagram Ads:

Very famously Instagram is known for its stories. As per the reports Instagram earns revenue of over $595 million dollars from its mobile advertising product.

It is said that 36% of females are more likely to be interested in using Instagram as compared to males with just 26%.

Youtube Ads:

Youtube is the most effective video advertising platform. According to the reports around 1 billion people watch Youtube Videos. And more than 80% of B2C Advertisers use youtube for their marketing campaigns.

As per the reports, the top ten Youtube video Ad leaderboards generated over 539 million + views in 2018. that’s equal to 14 million+ hours of video viewing time.

More than 62% of marketers are thinking of increasing the budgets for youtube video advertising campaigns.

Pinterest Ad:

According to the reports, Pinterest is aiming to earn an advertising revenue of around 1 billion dollars in 2019. And around 93% of Pinterest users come to Pinterest to plan a purchase.

Around 75% of the people who save pins actually are saving pins from businesses. Also, Pinterest is known for driving a large amount of referral traffic to business websites.

These facts assure that the Pinterest advertising platform is very promising for marketers.

With more and more people joining social media sites, social media advertising growth has also increased rapidly. In fact, social media advertising for small business is a viable option.

How Social media advertising can be used to build brand awareness & engagements?.

Any brand or business could think of excelling through digital marketing. But it’s important to focus on building brand awareness & engagements.

You might now question me “hey our business objective is getting sales. why do we need to focus on brand awareness and engagements?”.

The answer to that question is that most people are at the top of the funnel stage. Very few people will be in the bottom stage of the funnel.

So hence it’s very crucial to attract the people in your top of the funnel through building brand awareness & engagements.

For example, let’s take a real-world example.

How would a girl feel, if a stranger would just go out and propose to her straight away?. obviously, the girl would be freaked out right?.

On similar lines, even when we are executing social media advertising campaigns our promo messages & ads will reach 1000’s of potential customers in our targeted segmented of the audience.

But if you just go on & simply throw a lead Ad then not every person who sawed your ad will submit the lead form. That’s because a majority of the people had never seen your brand & engaged with your brand before.

And now all of a sudden you are throwing a lead ad to them and asking them to submit their details.

Only a few people who are at the bottom of the funnel would perhaps fill out that lead form. You can only imagine the quality of these leads who are filling out the lead forms without even engaging with your brand before in the past.

And this will be soon followed by the other drama, oh “Facebook leads ads to give low-quality leads”, “Facebook leads ads cost less but the quality is low”.

Honestly, I have seen even top influencer’s in the industry writing articles on these types of topics that actually give no solution to readers.

You might even argue with me that “the targeting & the message were not accurate”. Well if that’s the case then it’s worth running a test campaign with a small budget.

It would make your targeting & messaging proper.

Think of a social media advertising strategy.

From my understanding where most people go wrong in social media, advertising is at the strategic level. Without doing and brand awareness campaign & engagement campaign they jump off to conversions & leads.

And they end up with getting low-quality leads or negative ROI conversion campaigns.

The idea is to show sales-oriented promo messages to the people who have engaged with your brand past. Rather than showing your promo messages to a bunch of people who haven’t engaged with your brand or business.

Think of your funnel to get higher conversions.

For example, assume that 10000 people have engaged with your business through social media advertising.

Now, don’t you think you would better of setting up remarketing campaigns to retarget those ten thousand people in order to achieve conversions or sales?.

Don’t you think this strategy is a lot better than just sending your conversion-oriented promo to the newsfeeds of every people in your targeted segment of the audience?.

Definitely, you will get better results when you retarget your potential customers who have engaged with your brand in the past rather than sending out a promo message to someone who doesn’t know your brand at all.

Now the other important thing that most people get it wrong in social media advertising is that they just focus on cost, targeting, relevance score, etc. But they never pay proper attention to create an effective Message.

An effective social media Ad should consist of the brand’s unique value proposition, highlight product or service uniqueness, call to action and more.

Just think of this. yes, there are many competitors selling the same category or product or service that you sell.

But how is that you stand different from your competition?. Is it quality?. Perhaps is it with customer service?. Or Is it in the promo deals?.

Basically, it’s these types of things that need to be highlighted in your social media advertising campaigns. you need to highlight the things that make you stand apart from the competition.

Yes, it’s true that social media advertising cost’s much lesser than search engine advertising. But it does not mean to say that social media leads are bad, Facebook leads are bad,… That’s wrong.

Whether it’s for social media advertising or any advertising for that matter the secret of success lies within the marketing strategy.

Imagine a big tree as your social media marketing campaign. Then root’s of the tree is actually your social media advertising strategy. if the roots are stronger then the tree will be stronger and live longer.

Similarly, if the marketing strategy is stronger than your social media advertising campaigns will give strong ROI & great results in the long run.

Apart from this the basic key component of social media advertising campaigns is to analyze if the target audience is present on the platform.

I still remember a client who told me” we want to promote our chicken & sugar products to professionals LinkedIn”.

Honestly, I was just laughing in my mind after hearing this from my client.

Is it that only professionals buy chicken & sugar products? They are so many common people who buy sugar products.

I told to that client Linkedin normally works fine for B2B businesses & for businesses that sell high-value luxury goods by targeting professionals.

Now with Linkedin’s latest audience targeting feature & account targeting feature one could go on and set up a great successful campaign for a B2B business.

Or it might be even good to set up Linkedin advertising campaigns for selling luxury goods like diamonds, high-end cars, etc by targeting a professional segment of the audience.

On similar lines, I had a friend who ones asked me “What is your best targeting suggestions for promoting Luxury cars on Snapchat & facebook?”.

Honestly when we have a professional platform like Linkedin with over 400 million users. And having 4 times higher buying potential than a normal, common, ordinary online user why would someone think of promoting Luxury cars on Snapchat that is filled with millennials and teenagers?.

Myths in social media advertising.

Some of the common myths related to content that I have heard in the field of social media advertising are as follows:

We don’t need Content to deliver informative, educative & humorous content on social media channels for the target segment of the audience.

Oh, Linkedin is filled with a lot of professionals. So publishing humorous content is not a good idea.

oh, we don’t need to create great content to succeed in Facebook marketing. All we need to do is set up a campaign & do remarketing. Because after all, all we need is sales.

We don’t have any resources to create great content for our social media advertising campaigns.

Oh, it will be too late if we go on to create content, promote it to build awareness & engagement around our brand. Instead, it’s a good idea to run a conversion objective campaign on Facebook and get immediate sales.

Of course, it could be a good idea to just throw off a sales promo with a conversion objective if you have lots and lots of money to burn off.

Let me give you a small example of two businesses offering the same category of product or service.

Let’s call then Brand A & Brand B.

Brand A is following the good old traditional tactic of social media advertising. It was super focused on achieving sales by targeting its audience.

Brand A went on to create an effective Ad campaign, promo messaging, targeted audience, remarketing strategy, etc. It also focused on improving the relevance score of its Social media Ads.

Literally, it did everything but never tried to build brand awareness & engagements across its targeted audience.

All it did was try to convert the people at the bottom of the funnel stage which resulted in some conversions.

Now here is Brand B. Perhaps the wiser of the two brands. Now, this brand had created an effective social media advertising strategy. Its main idea was to first create a buyer persona to identify it’s targeted segment of the audience.

And then it would create informative, educative & humorous content for each and every audience in the funnel.

For example, it would create an informative video about its products to attract its audience at the top of the stage of the funnel. This would help in driving brand awareness for the brand.

And then it would retarget those people who watched more than 25% of video & send a humorous content that’s related to its product. This would help in creating lots of engagement with the brand.

Also, Brand B would target lookalike audiences and target similar people in it’s targeted segment of the audience to achieve more engagements & build more brand awareness.

And the other thing is that Brand B would also focus on increasing its social media follower base, conduct regular polls, quizzes, contests, and other organic social media activities.

It also aimed to build an active group of community within its social media followers.

And then our Brand B has a special strategy to get conversions & sales by retargeting all the people who have engaged with its brand as well. It would create a crispy sales promo to get more sales for its business.

Both Brand A & Brand B got sales businesses. But Brand A was washed out in the long run.

Because it’s sole goal-focused towards sales & not towards building brand awareness and engagements on social media.

It’s social media advertising costs skyrocketed because it was just focusing on selling its product to the bottom of the funnel stage audience.

All these things impacted Brand A’s marketing campaigns and resulted in a negative ROI.

Whereas Brand B which was smart. It was not just focused on sales but it focused three times higher on creating effective social media advertising strategy.

This helped to increase brand awareness and engagements. Hence as a result brand, B performed better in the long run. Since it was primary retargeting people who have engaged with its brand, more and more people became interested in the brand.

And this resulted in a reduced acquisition cost, reduced social media advertising costs & high-quality conversions to brand B.

The Logic here is that people do not need to buy anything and spend money to engage with a brand.

If they regularly engage with a brand then they would be better of buying a product from that brand that offers a solution to their problems rather than buying the same category of product from a stranger with which they never engaged in the past or heard of it before in the past.

Likewise, different brands might experiment with different types of social media advertising campaigns.

But remember the strategy of any social media advertising campaign should be towards building a relationship with the targeted segment of the audience rather than trying to just sell of some product or service.

Across the global level businesses are realizing the importance of creating high-quality content & inbound marketing tactics. And many businesses are slowly moving in that direction.

Remember bigger brands like Yahoo, Orkut, and many others? they all got washed out because they just could not adapt to the changing dynamic conditions.

Similarly, those businesses that just stick on to conversions objective advertising campaigns & fail to build brand awareness, fail to achiever higher engagements, fail to create high-quality content will definitely lead to business failure in the long run.

There many social media advertising examples of brands achieving Higher ROI in the long run by building brand awareness & engagements.

Yes, it’s true that it takes time & effort to build a brand. After all building, a brand is not just about setting up a conversion objective campaign on a social media advertising platform & wait for some magic to happen.

Define the Objectives of Your Social Media Advertising Campaign.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the interesting facts on how defining objectives in social media advertising can be impactful for the businesses.

The Greatest social media advertising benefits are that any type of business can incorporate social media advertising strategy for their marketing campaign.

Be it a Big MNC firm or a small startup or even a small local business or a retail shop shall integrate social media advertising strategies in their business.

By defining proper business objectives any business could take the advantages of social media advertising.

Now let’s take a look at some of the example case:

Suppose An IT Company looking to get more people to fill out its contact form for its software consulting service.

So here, in this case, the main objective of the social media advertising for business would be to lead generation. The firm can set up effective lead generation marketing campaigns on Linkedin and other appropriate social media advertising platforms.

Example 2:

Then Suppose let’s think of an e-commerce business that wants to drive more targeted traffic in order to get more sales for its business.

So the e-commerce business could the first set up a campaign with Brand awareness & Traffic as it’s campaign objective. And then, later on, it would retarget all the people interacting with its brand and do an engagement campaign.

Finally, to retarget people at the bottom of the funnel, e-commerce could set up a remarketing campaign with conversion objective which would give a great number of results for its business.

Example 3:

Similar lines we might think of a local retail shop. for these types of businesses getting footfalls is a key thing. because as a local business owner he or she would love to have more potential customers visiting their store isn’t it?

So for this purpose, the local business can set up a social media advertising campaign on Facebook with store visits as it’s objective. This would help the local business to attract more customers near its location.

The reason I thought of sharing the importance of defining objectives for a social media advertising campaign is that I have honestly seen many marketers doing mistakes while defining objectives.

For example, think of a marketer promoting an e-commerce business with lead generations as an objective. Now that’s the wrong objective for the wrong business case.

Because in an e-commerce business people are more interested in knowing about the brand’s products that are present in its online store rather than filling out a contact form.

As I said earlier, in this case, the brand would first set up a traffic campaign to get more traffic to its online store with Traffic as it’s campaign objective. And then it would be good to do remarketing campaigns with conversion as objective.

Another type of mistake that most marketers would do while setting up campaign objective is just thinking of sales all the time irrespective of the audience they are targeting in the funnel.

Remember a soft drinks brand?.

The first one that comes into our mind is Pepsi, right? or perhaps cocoa-cola, sprite, Miranda, or mountain dew for some of you right?.

Why these brands come to our minds even when we think of soft drinks though there are million soft drinks brands in this world?.

It’s because brands like Pepsi focused on brand building, brand awareness rather than focusing on just selling. And in the long run, this strategy has given them a substantial amount of rewards for their brand.

20 years ago when we thought of branding a product or a business all we had was traditional advertising methods. And these traditional advertising channels like TV, Newspapers, radio would charge heavy money for the business to advertise their products.

And after spending so much money on traditional advertising brands would find no way to measure their results & attribute results to specific channels.

Moreover, the budgets & charges of traditional advertising channels are beyond the reach of a small business owner.

But with the advent of social media advertising, even a small brand is now able to set up marketing campaigns & measure the results appropriately.

And social media advertising costs are actually much cheaper than traditional advertising methods. Forget about traditional advertising for a moment, in fact, social media advertising costs much lesser than Google Ads search engine marketing campaigns.

But the logic here is to think from a customer-centric or user-centric angle in each and every stage of executing your social media advertising campaigns.

Also, targeting social media advertising is known to much effective than other types of targeting methods.

Lookalike Audience Targeting:

For example, let’s consider Facebook lookalike audience targeting. It can help you get your brand messages in front of a vast number of similar people who have engaged or interacted with your brand in the past.

Linkedin Account Targeting & Interest Targeting:

Likewise, Linkedin’s account targeting feature is another extraordinary targeting feature. It can help you match the professional user’s accounts against 13 million Linkedin business pages.

Also, you can professionals & target decision-makers on Linkedin with the help of demographic targeting.

In the same different social media advertising platforms might have various types of targeting options. But remember the idea always remains the same in whichever type of social media advertising you do.

It is to build a brand by using a user-centric marketing strategy through social media advertising channels.

Which are the must-know social media advertising metrics?.

In general, if you want to measure results then you need a metric. Similarly to measure your social media advertising results you would need a metric.

Because how would you measure your results from a conversion objective campaign on facebook?.

How would you measure your results from an engagement campaign on facebook?.

How would you know how many people retweeted your tweets?.

And how would you analyze the number of people visiting your website through your social media advertising campaigns?.

The answer to all of these questions in one simple word is “Social media advertising metrics”.

Now let me explain it to you in detail.

Social media metrics can be defined as those things which help you measure the results of social media advertising campaigns. You can measure results on the basis of your social media advertising objective.

Example:

You are publishing a post on your facebook page today. And after 3-4 days you want to measure how many people interacted and engaged with your post?.

Basically, you want to track how many people sawed your post & clicked on the post links. And how many people commented and liked or shared your post?.

So, in this case, the metric that you would use to measure your results are Reach, clicks, likes, comments & shares.

Because Reach will help you measure the number of people who sawed your post. Likewise, Link clicks will help you measure the number of people clicking on your posts.

And Likes, comments & shares will help you measure the engagement rates of your social media advertising campaigns.

On the same lines, Assume that a brand is doing remarketing campaigns to increase it’s product sales. So here the brand or the business is mainly focused on measuring it’s product sales.

Ideally, in this case, the brand would make use of the Conversion metric & Catalog sales metric to measure its results.

Similarly, if a B2B business is doing a lead generation campaign on Facebook ads then Lead ( form) i.e. the number of people submitting their details on the lead form will be the metric that they would like to measure.

And then if a business is promoting videos then the metric that they would love to measure is Video views.

Social Media Advertising Analytics.

social media advertising analytics plays a vital role in achieving a high ROI for any business.

Suppose you set up a social media advertising campaign and run it with a budget.

Now, How would you analyze your campaign results?.

How to analyze your Cost Per result?.

How would you know which placements or demographics are giving the best results for your social media advertising campaigns?.

What was the cost per result for each and every segment of demographics in your targeted audience?.

Which segment of demographics and placement gave you the highest results and lowest cost per result?.

All these questions can be accurately answered with the help of social media advertising analytics.

Example of my own Facebook Ads Campaign Analytics Reports.

For example, let’s have a look at the analytics reports of one of my facebook ads campaign.

These campaigns have got 1158 results at 0.38 paisa per cost per result. The campaign result rate is around 46%.

So then what are the insights that I could gain to improve my campaign performance with the help of Facebook advertising analytics?.

I just select the campaign & choose view charts. And then I go to demographics. I find an interesting insight. It suggests that it cost per result for females was much lesser than the cost per result for males.

And the age group 25-34 has the highest number of results with the lowest cost per result.

Likewise, under placements, I could analyze that desktop devices on facebook network has given me more results than mobile devices.

I can use all these social media advertising analytics to optimize my campaigns for better performance by making use of the data from Facebook ads analytics.

In the same way, you can also easily analyze your Facebook advertising analytics for your advertising campaigns.

To analyze other various facebook advertising analytics reports do the following things:

Select the campaign

Click on Breakdown

Click on By delivery

Now underneath that, you will be easily able to see the campaign data for your social media campaigns. The reports data can be broken down to targeting age group, location, gender, device, product id, placements and more.

For example in my campaign breakdown, if I choose locations then I’m able to see the cost per result for each and every specific country.

Similarly, click on By Actions. There you will see the data for conversion device type, post-reaction type, carousel card and many more.

For example, the data for the conversion device type would allow me to analyze data of the devices used by the people to take action as a result of my ads.

In the same way, we can analyze the social media advertising analytics data for various social media advertising platforms like Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads, Quora Ads and more.

But remember the logic & the idea of social media advertising analytics will always remain the same.

And that’s to analyze the social media ad campaign data at various specific levels. And that help’s to optimize our social media ad campaigns for better performance.

Conclusion:

There is no doubt that in this digital era social media advertising could get the best possible results for any business. Defining the social media advertising objectives, creating an effective strategy, executing the campaigns with performance-driven tactics & analyzing the data to make proper decisions are the key aspects of social media advertising. And whatever strategy you create it ultimately needs to be a User-centric strategy for your brand.

If you love this article please do share it on social media sites with your friends.

Thanks.