If you were to post on a Facebook business page with 1,000 followers, you might notice that only 30 of them will actually view the content. Unfortunately, this is how Facebook’s algorithm has worked for some years, gone are the days when you could post and expect to reach the majority of your followers. Twitter and Instagram (frustratingly) followed suit, and now the only way to reach all your followers (and beyond) is to use paid advertising campaigns.

You can use paid advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and other mainstream networks, with many offering the same array of targeting tools. If you decide to use paid advertising, you’ll be allowed to push your content onto the home pages of new customers and clients. What makes social media so brilliant is the sheer amount of people you can target compared to traditional advertising platforms - and it’s cost-effective too!

Did you know there are nearly 40 million active daily social media users in the UK? To put it into perspective; 9.45m people are currently tuning in to watch The Great British Bake-Off on Channel 4; 2.04m people now read the UK’s largest circulated magazine by The National Trust, and Capital Radio reaches a mere 7.4m listeners a week. Britons are spending around 1 hour and 40 minutes on their social networks every day, do the maths and it’s a no-brainer really.

Once you’ve finalised your content and agreed on a spending budget, there are endless amounts of targeting choices. The most common way businesses advertise is by “boosting” individual posts and pursuing an audience generated by your target audience. This can be a combination of location, age, gender, and specific interests, or you can go deeper and target the type of phone they use, their salary, education, relationship status, where they work, you can even target people who have returned from travelling one week ago – it goes on. It sounds scary, but it’s incredibly efficient. These social networks monitor all their users’ activity for your advertising benefits.

It doesn’t stop there. Some social networks offer highly intelligent remarketing services, such as the ability to track someone who has looked at a specific product on your website and serve them your advert if they didn’t complete the purchase. You’ve probably been privy to this e-commerce retargeting before! Another great technique is to use your existing database to target people who have connected with your business in the past, just as long as they signed up to Facebook with the same email you have on file (+ GDPR compliance is followed to the letter!)

The main thing social media networks encourage the most is transparency. As a business, you’ll never have access to the list of users the social network chooses to target (unless you used a database). Because of this, you won’t be in control of other people’s personal data – your stress levels can be reduced back to a steady medium!

We love social media at DRIVE. You’re never restricted to the type of content you want to promote, whether you want video, photography, animation, infographics, interactive ads and more – there’s so much creativity to be had! We’ve consistently seen successful results from our paid social campaigns, and we can’t recommend it enough.

If this article has peaked your interest in the power of social media advertising and you’d like to give it a go, please get in touch!