While social media is a great place to have a presence, unless you have a decent following it’s something of a waste of time. The fastest way to attract visitors and build up your profile is to pay for some exposure to reach users you might not otherwise connect with. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn each have their own advertising platforms, and all operate slightly differently. Figuring out which is the “best” option depends on your target market, your product and your advertising budget.
Fabulous Facebook
Facebook’s advertising options are great for small businesses, arts and crafts and individuals, particularly in the business to consumer (B2C) space. Ads are quick and easy to set up, cost per click is low and you can use sophisticated targeting to identify exactly who should see your ad based on age, location, education and interests. Facebook ads work really well for increasing Likes to your business page or promoting a specific post to reach a certain market. The minimum budget is $5 per day and you can start and stop an ad at any time, so you can avoid unpleasant financial surprises. Ads typically run at between $0.58 and $0.80, which means you can get around 6 a day for $35 per week.
LinkedIn Lowdown
With the business perspective that governs LinkedIn, you’d think it would be the perfect place to advertise business services. That may be, but at this point it’s still working better for individuals offering services such as consulting than it does for business to business (B2B) operations. That’s because few corporate buyers actually use LinkedIn for suppliers and service providers. They’re more likely to use a search engine to look for specific services in their area.
LinkedIn does have the advantage of offering all your business contacts in one place, ready to access, but the success of your advertising depends to a large degree on how often they log in and how much time they spend on the site. With ads running at between $2 and $3 a click and a daily minimum of $10, you’re looking at 3 or 4 clicks a day for a cost of $70 a week. That makes it more than double the cost of Facebook advertising, and advertisers haven’t seen dramatic conversion rates to date.
Twitter Turmoil
Twitter isn’t considered the busiest traffic junction in the world for nothing. With users averaging more than 100,000 tweets per minute, you’d think the intersecting forces make it the obvious place to advertise. The two options available, which are sponsored tweets and sponsored profiles, resembles Facebook’s sponsored posts and promoted pages options. Sponsored tweets typically generate high rates of click-throughs, but experiments showed very poor conversion rates. At around $1.50 per click, it could be a lot of money for nothing and no chicks for free.
The account promotion option has proved more successful, but it’s expensive because businesses have to buy blocks of 1,000 impressions. An experiment with buying 20,000 impressions netted 47 new followers at a cost per follower of $2.30. If you need the followers badly it could be worth it, but it’s an expensive way to promote your company.
At this point, Facebook appears to be winning the social media advertising race. Whether that will continue remains to be seen, but if you’re thinking of putting some money into the medium at this point then Facebook is a low-cost way to get your feet wet.
*Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
