In a world of social media platforms that require no monetary payments from users, the question “What is paid social media?” can sound contradictory. A little specificity goes a long way, so let’s rephrase the question as “What is paid social media advertising?” Now, we’re getting somewhere.
Here, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about paid social marketing, including how to determine if it’s right for your business. But first, let’s start with the basics.
It’s when you pay a platform to ensure your posts and other content get seen by the right people. These platforms know a lot about their users. And are happy to let you leverage those insights for a price.
Effectively using paid social allows you to reach a wider audience, spark engagement within relevant niches, and build brand awareness.
A local gluten-free bakery wants to expand its customer base. It doesn’t ship its products, so it relies on people who live within its region.
The bakery’s staff launches two new types of cinnamon rolls and realizes they have a prime opportunity to build excitement about their menu. After creating a post with delectable photos of their rolls, they use Facebook’s targeting tools to ensure as many gluten-free millennials as possible who live within 25 miles of their location see it.
The boosted post gets a huge response. Plus, the bakery sends out a marketing email that includes content from the social post and encourages readers to visit Facebook to learn more. This omnichannel approach generates more likes on the post and additional subscribers to the bakery’s Facebook page.
Now, let’s look at a second example that involves the platform called X (formally known as Twitter). One of a technology company’s computer keyboards isn’t selling as well as projected, resulting in excess products piling up in its warehouse.
The team decides to reduce the keyboard’s price by 50%. But not many customers notice the deal on the company’s website, which isn’t surprising based on the historical lack of interest in this particular keyboard.
Most of this company’s customers use X, so the marketing team creates a paid ad touting the discount and highlighting a few of the keyboard’s unique benefits. The ad pays off in a big way, and the team sells nearly all their excess stock. While many of the transactions came from existing customers, 20% of the sales were from first-time buyers, which thrilled the company leaders.
As you can see from these paid social media examples, the right investment can have a substantial impact on your advertising efforts. The key is always to get the right content in front of the right people.
By design, social media platforms provide entertaining and engaging content to users. Because of this networking focus, platforms give priority to the content shared by your family and friends. Whether a heartwarming post from your partner or a hilarious throwback photo shared by a college friend, these are the things that typically keep you engaged.
Businesses often struggle to stand out among all these distractions.
With organic posts, you create social media content and post it on your brand’s various channels without any actions that might give it an extra boost. Sometimes this organic content resonates with your audience and generates engagement. Other times, it fizzles. As crucial as organic content is to your social media presence, there’s just no way to guarantee strong performance.
With paid social media, on the other hand, you remove the element of chance and pay for better results. Not only will your investment ensure that more people see your content, but you can use paid social advertising tools to improve your targeting. These advantages ensure your messages get in front of the optimal demographics.
So is it worth it to invest in paid social? Well, if a business has just had an organic post go viral with thousands of comments and hundreds of shares, the marketing team might think that paid social is unnecessary. But not so fast.
How often can you replicate virality? Only a small fraction of the business content on social media platforms will ever catch on like this, so it’s smart to include both organic and paid social media for your advertising efforts.
Social media platforms of all varieties are more than happy to take your money in exchange for higher visibility for your posts. The exact promotional capabilities, the range of targeting and tracking tools, and the cost for these services vary across platforms.
But your objective is to figure out which platforms are most relevant to your audience and will most empower your goals. Perhaps LinkedIn is where your audience responds best. Or your audience might skew younger and dwell on YouTube and TikTok. We’ll talk more about paid social media strategy later in this article, but first, let’s take a closer look at three of the biggest platforms.
As we mentioned above, three billion of the world’s eight billion humans use this platform at least once a month. That’s a stunning statistic that shows how relevant Facebook likely is for your audience.
Given the vast amount of information Facebook has gathered on each of its billions of users, the platform enables you to target ads with remarkable accuracy. Examples include:
Age
Gender
Languages spoken
Interests
Behavior
Location (country, region, and city)
After submitting your projected campaign spend, you’ll have the opportunity to select the elements of your audience profile. So rather than throwing out a wide net that wastes your money on uninterested people, you’ll connect with your optimal audience.
You also have multiple options with formatting your paid social advertising. Facebook’s paid ads can include either a photo or video and accompanying text.
The platform also offers carousel ads, which allow you to string together multiple frames of photos or videos that users can swipe through. While video ads are often among the most engaging, carousel ads are effective when promoting a series of related products or services because you can include unique links on each frame.
Given the low price, why not experiment with these formats to find what resonates most with your audience?
While many users have stepped back from daily use since Elon Musk assumed the helm of this popular social media platform, X still boasts hundreds of millions of users. And the microblogging platform remains a powerful communication tool in our modern world.
As with Facebook, X offers targeting tools to help your paid social marketing reach the right demographic in the right place. Key metrics include:
Location
Language
Device
Age
Gender
Paid ads on X are popular because these integrate seamlessly into a user’s feed and don’t stand out as much from the other content. While this might seem like a liability, it may help your content get noticed more because users don’t immediately scroll past it like they might with ads on other platforms.
When setting up your ads on X, you decide the format, the viewing frequency, and the viewing location. Locking in your budget and these details ahead of time ensures you have a strong chance of reaching your goals while ensuring that you don’t spend more than you planned.
Paid ads on X are popular because these integrate seamlessly into a user’s feed and don’t stand out as much from the other content. While this might seem like a liability, it may help your content get noticed more because users don’t immediately scroll past it like they might with ads on other platforms.
When setting up your ads on X, you decide the format, the viewing frequency, and the viewing location. Locking in your budget and these details ahead of time ensures you have a strong chance of reaching your goals while ensuring that you don’t spend more than you planned.
Promoted posts (previously called tweets) are another popular option on X. You create a standard post just as you would when sharing organic content with your followers, then pay X to broadcast your post to a target audience. Likewise, X will recommend that its users follow your account if you pay for a promoted account through the platform.
This popular Facebook-owned platform boasts more than 1.3 billion users worldwide. Once you’ve set up a business profile, you can run ads in various formats:
Photo
Video
Carousel
Story
Since Instagram is a visual medium without as much room for text as Facebook or X, it’s essential that your images are top quality and engaging. With ads on this platform clearly identified, users must make a conscious decision to view what you display.
A unique benefit of Instagram is that you can create an e-commerce store through the app. So even if you don’t have a stand-alone e-commerce website that can accept payments, you can share “shoppable” posts that users can click to make purchases.
The two most crucial aspects of any paid social media strategy are the objective and the budget. Given the variability in format, execution, and pricing across various social media platforms, you must have these two guiding lights to create a consistent and effective campaign.
Once your team has agreed on the objective and budget, it’s time to flesh out the strategy. Here are eight key steps:
Identify the target audience.
Identify the optimal platforms.
Review past organic posts to find what has performed best.
Review past paid content (if relevant) to find what has performed best.
Choose the best calls to action (CTAs) for your content.
Create timelines for your campaigns.
Assign team members to create and oversee the content for improved consistency.
Analyze all content prior to posting to ensure brand guidelines.
Congratulations! You now have a plan that will streamline the process and keep you focused on the prime objective.
While every team has its unique priorities and processes, it’s hard to imagine a modern organization not benefitting from paid social media. First, the barrier of entry is incredibly low due to the affordability. Not only is the cost lower than with many other types of advertising, but the platforms provide user-friendly tools to create the ads. Anyone can build them, so you don’t need to pay a developer or designer to do it.
The other key benefit of paid social advertising is the opportunity to reach targeted demographics from within a vast audience that (literally) spans the globe. This dynamic of sharing a specific message with a select few from billions of possible connections has only been possible with the advent of social media platforms.
Just as with any other type of advertising, it takes effort and patience to run paid social campaigns. So you’ll need to make sure your team stays focused on the main objective and watch out for messaging and brand inconsistencies that might arise between different platforms.
But as long as your team sticks to the plan, you can attain your goals while staying within the budget you laid out in the beginning.
When you embrace an omnichannel approach to engage your customers, you’ll get better business results and provide an optimal user experience. Twilio SendGrid’s Marketing Campaigns can help.
SendGrid’s email marketing is the perfect complement to your paid social strategies because it provides another touchpoint that can reach customers when they’re not on a specific social media platform.
Successful teams use these two channels to strengthen each other. For example, you can use email metrics to identify your strongest subject lines and CTAs, then employ them in your paid social. Or you could create paid social campaigns that attract subscribers to your email newsletter.
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