What are the Benefits of Advertising on Facebook and Instagram?
When running a business, you may often hear certain jargon being thrown at you every which way. People will talk about Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, SEO, content and more. Yet if youâre a business owner and your speciality lies in delivering products and service, you might feel a bit out of your depth when people start talking about these things.
Companies like First Page Digital exist to help people like you understand what exactly is going on when it comes to marketing through social media. After all, thatâs what our learning center is for.
So when people tell you about Social Media Advertising, what exactly is it? And how does it benefit you? Read on to find out.
The Digital Age
If your business isnât online these days, itâs safe to say that you might as well not have a business. If your presence isnât online, you simply have no presence. Can you remember the last time you needed a plumber and opened the yellow pages?
But what does an âonline presenceâ mean? Can you get a website and consider yourself done? Technically you could but, this would be a one-way road to disaster. After all, a website on its own is a bit like having a storefront with no advertising; people will only know your business exists if they see it, and theyâll only see it if they catch your storefront amongst the hundreds of others surrounding it.
So how do you get your business noticed online? One of the most popular methods is social media advertising. No matter what you might think of them, the fact is that Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites are imperative to establishing your businessâs success. These days, theyâre the digital equivalent of a billboard.
What Social Media Does
There are hundreds of social media sites available online, and it shouldnât be any surprise that most of these sites cater to different audiences. Itâs easy to lump âsocial mediaâ in with the miasma of teenage drama, angst, celebrity scandal, and cheap tabloid gossip â but the facts are far more intellectual.
LinkedIn is a social media site designed for business networking: generating connections in your industry or gaining the latest news and insights relevant to your professional niche. Bumble is a dating app designed to enhance womenâs autonomy in the process. Flickr is a site devoted to photography and making connections within the pro photography world.
The fact is that there are many social media sites, because they all fill different desires according to their audience. These days however, there are two powerhouses in the social media sphere when it comes to advertising your business â Facebook and Instagram.
What to Know about Facebook Advertising
Facebook advertising is a platform pretty much all successful businesses take advantage of. Most businesses these days are using Facebook one way or another, and itâs easy to see why. As of 2021, Facebook has over 2.89 billion active users. Once again, it is important to stress that not all social sites share the same goal.
When it comes to Facebook advertising, studies show that Facebook is established as a place for personal interactions, rather than interactions with companies. For this reason, Facebook boasts a mere 0.7% audience engagement rate, and a 6% rate in brand reach.
So what can Facebook do for your business? Currently, Facebook advertising is king in two areas. Facebookâs paid advertising has the best outreach with members of your target audience that are aged 30 and over. Secondly, Facebook advertising makes it easier to funnel people to a 3rd-party website. This is because Facebook is a platform where people talk, and when people talk, theyâre likely to share information about the newest and best products and services theyâve found.
Facebook Algorithm
Every social website has an algorithm that prioritises what content you see over other posts. Knowing this allows you to tailor your posts specifically to wherever youâre advertising. Facebookâs algorithm places its priorities in the following way:
-Friends and Family
-Engagement
-Encouraging Engagement
-Images and Videos
-Clickbait and promotional posts are actively filtered out.
What to Know about Instagram Advertising
For a more direct method of attack to your audience, you canât get much better than Instagram advertising. Where Facebookâs strength is with word-of-mouth marketing and link sharing among a mature-age audience, Instagram is all about directly marketing to a younger demographic, and giving your brand a âvoiceâ.
Instagram advertising is a brilliant tool for spreading awareness, and showcasing new products and services offered by your company. Studies have shown that audiences use Instagram for comparison shopping, as it allows easy viewing between company promos and content. Itâs also the only social media platform to be specially tailored to a marketing strategy that has gained significant traction in the last decade, influencer marketing.
If Facebook advertising is a slow burn that lasts a long while, Instagram advertising is a devouring flame that consumes quickly and burns out fast. Instagram advertising allows you to be quick, conversational and off-the-cuff with your content, getting out the latest updates to your audience as fast as possible. Influencer marketing allows you to put even more personality behind your content, as internet celebrities are generally open to endorsing your product in exchange for sponsorship.
The Instagram Algorithm
As with Facebook, Instagram Advertising has an algorithm to take into consideration when tailoring content to your audience.
-Engagement
-Relevancy
-Relationships (more frequent engagement with contentâs publisher)
-Timeliness (more recent posts ranked higher)
-Profile searches
-Direct shares
-Time spent on post
What the Benefits Are
So now you know all about Facebook advertising and instagram advertising, but youâre still yet to understand what advertising on these platforms can do for your business. Really, the end goals of digital and traditional advertising arenât all that different, itâs just the platform used to advertise is different.
However, the means are different. Whereas in the old days you could get by on a quality product and decent exposure, nowadays you need to have something else â personality. A company that appears to have more or âbetterâ personality than its competitors is more likely to reach their desired level of success.
Social media advertising achieves this through four major benefits: brand building, brand growth, content and media, and communication.
Brand Building
As the name suggests, building a brand is the act of getting your company off the ground. Itâs the foundations that announce âhere I amâ to the world. When you build your brand you are literally putting in the hard yards â getting yourself seen and establishing yourself as a name to watch in a particular field or industry. Facebook and Instagram advertising helps in the following ways:
Increase Brand Awareness
The first step to getting your brand out there is to make people aware that your brand exists. Increasing brand awareness is vital to any business, and is a continual concern throughout a businessâs lifetime. Social media is uniquely placed to increase brand awareness, as it allows users to update audiences multiple times a day, and content once posted is always available to consumers. As stated above, Instagram advertising is based on a more âliveâ feel, with rapid updates occurring frequently. Facebook advertising, on the other hand, is more based on the slow burn.
Creating a Personality
When you make posts online, it gives the audience the feeling of talking to someone rather than pandering to a company. People like to feel like theyâre interacting with something real, and live updates coupled with content that doesnât directly relate to the products or services offered increases trust in your brand.
Becoming a Thought Leader
A thought leader is basically marketing jargon for âauthorityâ. To be a âthought leaderâ is to be the laymanâs go-to source of information in a particular field. Social media advertising allows you to demonstrate your expertise through customer testimonials, live updates, and educational videos. Show people that you know what youâre talking about, and their trust and patronage will follow.
In Sight, In Mind
Social Mediaâs biggest advantage is this â everyone is always on it, all of the time. If you plan and design your content well and release it at the right time, the algorithm for Facebook or instagram will make sure that eventually, your voice is heard, and social media is the easiest way to keep in the public eye. Therefore when they actually need you, theyâll remember âOh yeah, I saw a post about this the other dayâŠâ
Brand Growth
So now you can see what social media can do for you in terms of exposing your brand to the world, what do you do once youâre on the global stage? You keep going. You offer your services, specials, deals, and you post content that encourages the spread of your brand.
Web Traffic
Web traffic is exactly what it sounds like. Itâs foot traffic but on the internet. When your website has good foot traffic it means that youâre getting a lot of people visiting your site frequently. You can use social media (Facebook advertising is particularly good at this) to publish content that encourages people to go to your site. This in turn increases your Search Engine Optimization ranking, placing you higher when people enter keywords into search engines that have to do with your industry,
Generate Leads
âLeadsâ is the fancy marketing term for âpeople interested in your brandâ. Social media keeps you in constant contact with your audience and the people therein, so you find youâll be generating leads both within your audience, and outside your audience through the things they share.
Boosting Sales
Of course when thereâs more traffic coming to your site and more people interested in what youâre selling, it makes sense that your sales would rise. You can use your socials as living advertising, keeping your audience in the loop through live updates and personalised content. Inevitably, this will lead to more interest in your brand, which will lead to more sales.
Partner with Influencers
When you get an influencer to partner with you and endorse your product, it can bring hundreds, if not thousands, of new blood to your audience. This method of advertising can be costly, as influencers will usually endorse products in exchange for sponsorship or free products â but if you pick the right influencer, you can reap significant benefits.
Content and Media
Weâve spoken a lot about âpostsâ and âcontentâ but what exactly do we mean by that? A companyâs voice is only as good as the content it produces, things like blogs, videos, selfies, development posts. Basically any update accompanied by a graphic, photo, video, or extended text post can be considered âcontentâ.
Communication
Finally, social media marketing grants business wonders a unique form of communication. Rather than going from department to department, your customerâs queries and concerns can be sent to your socials and answered directly and quickly. Not only this but the open channels of communication offer an increased ability to manage your reputation, as well as put out public messages during any kind of PR crisis that might arise.
The Wrap-Up
Social Media advertising is a lot of work, but any business that makes good use of it will reap significant rewards. If your company seems to always be behind the loop, it may be worth looking into a social media advertising campaign. If you feel like you canât get your head around a social media campaign, try talking to First Page Digital digital strategists, and we can help you get off the ground.
