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 you’re 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, that’s 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 isn’t online these days, it’s safe to say that you might as well not have a business. If your presence isn’t 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 “online presence” 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 they’ll 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 business’s success. These days, they’re the digital equivalent of a billboard.

What Social Media Does

There are hundreds of social media sites available online, and it shouldn’t be any surprise that most of these sites cater to different audiences. It’s easy to lump “social media” in with the miasma of teenage drama, angst, celebrity scandal, and cheap tabloid gossip – 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 women’s 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 – 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 it’s 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. Facebook’s 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, they’re likely to share information about the newest and best products and services they’ve 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 you’re advertising. Facebook’s 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 can’t get much better than Instagram advertising. Where Facebook’s 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 “voice”.

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. It’s 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 content’s 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 you’re still yet to understand what advertising on these platforms can do for your business. Really, the end goals of digital and traditional advertising aren’t all that different, it’s 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 – personality. A company that appears to have more or “better” 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. It’s the foundations that announce “here I am” to the world. When you build your brand you are literally putting in the hard yards – 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 business’s 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 “live” 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 they’re interacting with something real, and live updates coupled with content that doesn’t 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 “authority”. To be a “thought leader” is to be the layman’s 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 you’re talking about, and their trust and patronage will follow.

In Sight, In Mind

Social Media’s biggest advantage is this – 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, they’ll remember “Oh yeah, I saw a post about this the other day…”

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 you’re 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. It’s foot traffic but on the internet. When your website has good foot traffic it means that you’re 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

“Leads” is the fancy marketing term for “people interested in your brand”. Social media keeps you in constant contact with your audience and the people therein, so you find you’ll be generating leads both within your audience, and outside your audience through the things they share.

Boosting Sales

Of course when there’s more traffic coming to your site and more people interested in what you’re 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 – but if you pick the right influencer, you can reap significant benefits.

Content and Media

We’ve spoken a lot about “posts” and “content” but what exactly do we mean by that? A company’s 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 “content”.

Communication

Finally, social media marketing grants business wonders a unique form of communication. Rather than going from department to department, your customer’s 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 can’t 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.