Growth of Social Media Advertising and Advanced Targeting Options
1.
2. Facebook launched its first advertising option
in May 2005.
Since then Social Media Advertising has
grown leaps and bounds.
In 10 years by 2015, Social Media Advertising
revenue reached $8.4 billion.
3. Online Advertising is a natural source for
modern businesses.
Paid search is a great online advertising
medium for driving visitors to your webpage.
But businesses didn’t have keywords to bid
on to drive traffic.
Businesses wanted to create brand awareness
rather than capturing user intent, thus the
need for Social Media Advertising became
important.
4. Stretching beyond general demographic and
geographic data, social media advertising has
opened the door to deeper interest,
behavioral and connection-based targeting
methods.
Four main Advanced Targeting Options,
◦ Interest Targeting
◦ Behavioural/ Connection Targeting
◦ Custom Targeting
◦ Lookalike Targeting
5. Reach specific audiences by looking at their
self-reported interests, activities, skills,
pages/users they have engaged with, etc.
Interest targeting is often related to keyword
targeting, so some platforms will allow you to
enter both.
Interests can be as general as an industry
(e.g. automotive industry) or as specific as a
product (e.g. convertibles). Offered by:
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (under “Skill”),
Pinterest.
6. With behavioural targeting, you can reach
people based on purchase behaviours or
intents and/or device usage.
With connection targeting, you can reach
people who have a specific kind of connection
to your page, app, group, or event.
Both types of targeting take past behaviour
into account to help you determine intent.
Offered by: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.
7. Reach audiences by uploading a list of email
addresses, phone numbers, users IDs, or
usernames.
Facebook calls its custom targeting Custom
Audiences, while Twitter calls its own Tailored
Audiences.
They’re largely based on the same concept:
“If you have a known group of people you’d
like to target, you can simply upload them and
target them directly (provided that the social
network can match the data you’re uploading with
real profiles)”
Offered by: Facebook, Twitter.
8. Reach new people who are similar to an
audience. Lookalike targeting helps
businesses extend their custom audiences to
reach new, similar users.
For those businesses looking to acquire new
customers through social media advertising,
lookalike targeting can be a fantastic
acquisition tool.
Offered by: Facebook, LinkedIn.
9. With all the new options for targeting users, tracking the
performance of your social media advertising campaign is
even more important for justifying your spend and requesting
a budget.
While you can still pay-per-click to your website or choose
other metrics to measure the success of your ad, most social
networks now offer website conversion tracking.
Conversion tracking requires that you add a snippet of code
to the page on your website where the conversion will take
place, so it does require a bit of technical ability and extra
effort, but you’ll then be able to attribute any conversions on
that page to the ads you’re running.
Conversion tracking helps your business be smarter about
your ad spend and strategy. If your ad is receiving a lot of
clicks (which you are paying for) but no conversions, it’s a
wasted investment. This information will allow you to
better optimize your ad copy and targeting.
10. Mobile users are already checking Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Pinterest multiple times
a day, so advertising to them while they’re within
those apps is the best way to reach them without
being disruptive.
Mobile advertising was on course to comprise
68% of Facebook’s revenue and 84% of Twitter’s
in 2014, and
two-thirds of social media advertising spend is
forecasted to go towards mobile ads in 2018,
creating a $9.1 billion market on mobile.