Which Social Network Should You Advertise On?

Which Social Network Should You Advertise On?

1) LinkedIn

The Good: One major benefit to using LinkedIn is its user base, which consists mainly of business professionals. Over LinkedIn, your ads are almost always seen by business-minded individuals, like yourself. This makes it a social media platform with high conversion rates. Like Facebook, you can also target niche groups in categories like demographics, employee title and location.

The Bad: Don’t expect a high click-through rate for your ad here. However, while you’ll rack in fewer overall clicks on LinkedIn, the users behind the clicks are much more qualified than they are on the other social media channels.  On Facebook, you may get as many as 1 in 200 impressions; on LinkedIn, it’s common to receive 1 in 500.

Another downside of using LinkedIn is the cost of running an ad campaign. It’s normal to pay up to four or five dollars a click. The extra cost may be worth it for you, however, because you’re reaching a higher-quality audience for your business and bypassing those who aren’t interested automatically.

2) Twitter

The Good: Twitter allows you to target people based on their current interests. Every time someone sends out a tweet with a hashtag, you have the ability to target them via social media advertising; this is just like keyword targeting on Google AdWords.

Another way you can effectively target a particular audience on Twitter is by
coming in on a particular user. Find someone, like an industry influencer, and target their set of followers to extend your ad’s reach.

The Bad: Even though Twitter has a great ability to target users through keywords and hashtags, targeting by interest isn’t as easy. The selection of interests to choose from is extremely limited. The closest interest category for a B2B inbound marketing agency to choose from is “Marketing.”

Choosing this category will not prove to be very effective since it includes such a vast industry. Twitter has the potential to be a great channel to advertise on, once they expand their categories for advertising.

3) Google+

The Good: Since the search engine giant created this social media platform, it’s no wonder they added SEO benefits to it. Any activity on your company’s page is calculated into your search optimization. For someone in your circle, your company’s page will appear before others that are not in their circles. People using Google+ are usually more tech-driven than those on Facebook or Twitter. If you think this is the right audience for you, it could be advantageous to use your marketing tactics there.

Google+ features “+Post ads” that post on Google’s Display Network, which increases the reach of your advertisements considerably. This is a major plus because visitors don’t have to be directed to another website with their clicks

The most unique aspect of these ads is that an advertiser doesn’t pay for an ad if someone doesn’t click on it. They only pay for as many clicks as it gets. The one downside of this is that Google counts hovering over the ad for more than two seconds as a click.

The Bad: This social media network hasn’t received nearly as much engagement as the other three sites mentioned in this blog. It only has 540 million users; compared to the others, this is very low. It also doesn’t support advanced targeting options as Facebook does. Here, you can segment ads based on demographic targeting, contextual targeting and device targeting.

The promotion policies are also very restrictive, so contests,
promos and giveaways aren’t a possibility, which stops many companies from advertising here. For this reason, the best way your business can use this site is for its SEO feature. This feature is also limited, however; if you’re not in someone’s circles, it won’t help Google get your website seen by those users

4) Facebook

The Good: Facebook has the largest audience, with over 1.19 billion registered users. The major plus with advertising here is the visibility it could give to your company. This makes Facebook a great choice for a small business. With the option to advertise based on location, you can easily increase your reach. Unlike LinkedIn, it’s a very cost-effective option. You can spend as little as a dollar a day per ad.

Another pro with Facebook ads is their advanced targeting options. When advertising on Facebook, you can target viewers based on six different categories: location, gender, likes/interests, relationship status, workplace and education.

They also do their own form of A/B testing for you. Facebook lets you create multiple ad variations and uses the best-performing ad set from those variations. This gives you very valuable information about the effectiveness of each ad your company is producing.

The Bad: Facebook as advertising only has one crucial drawback you should keep in mind: the metrics that Facebook provides regarding ad performance are (currently) pretty minuscule compared to other sites.

Need help?

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