Facebook and Twitter Advertising for Small Businesses

For small businesses, the complex ecosystem of social media advertising can be difficult to navigate. To succeed in social media campaign, plenty of small businesses are frustrated by their attempts to attract customers from Facebook and Twitter.

Small businesses that need to thrive in the competition on the internet requires a great deal of intense marketing. Marketing is one of the most crucial strategy for promoting a business. And when it comes to the internet, internet marketing strategy should be well chosen to find what suits best.

Small businesses must see social media as a campaign for larger strategy, not because it's necessary. Seeing it a larger strategy can radically enlarge themselves though these networks and make them execute smart tactics.

Before putting your resources into a Facebook page of a Twitter account, it's worth noting that in marketing terms, the key performance indicators (KPI), determines the success or failure of a business. If customers' word-of-mouth is essential as an acquisition strategy, then it's worth looking at social media to amplify the outcome. On the other hand, if you see your Facebook fans spend more than non-Facebook fans, it may be worth investing on advertisement to boost your number of fans.

Different business have different KPIs. You may want to test them against marketing investments and other campaigns because each of them will perform different from one business to another.

Whether a business or a company is about creating, marketing, selling, or distributing media, social media is a medium that can create a brand, build demand and establish visibility without doing any active promotion. Social media optimization for your social objects should be used accordingly with you ads campaign to engage users in a way that they see it most appealing.

Facebook's Advertisement

As the largest social media, Facebook ads used to be a complex campaign. With continuous improvement and overhaul, the company has made it much simpler to purchase ads.

Before starting a campaign advertisement, you must first identify your marketing objective. Do you want Facebook users to buy something on your site? You should optimize for website conversions. If you simply want more Likes on your Facebook page - knowing that Facebook fans tend to be valuable customers in the long run - then optimizing for page Likes is the solution. You can also optimize for website clicks, post engagement, app installs, app engagement, Offer claims and RSVPs to a Facebook event.

Once an objective has been identified, Facebook will guide you to the most appropriate ad type. Facebook will help you figure out where your ad is likely to perform best. You'll also need to choose a headline, image and text for your ad. Facebook recommends texts to be "succinct, friendly and conversational."

Once an ad has been chosen, you'll need to decide who can see it. You can target people by location, age, gender, interest, relationship status, language, education and even workplace. You can also opt to target only people who are or are not already connected to your page or app, or the friends of people who already like your page or app. This unique type of ads targeting should be thought out carefully.

On the last part, there's the budget. You can allot a daily or lifetime budget, the former of which will allow you to space out your ads over a broader time. You can also decide how you want to pay: You can either pay for specific actions (such as Likes or website purchases), or per thousand impressions. Facebook will help you choose the best one. Pricing varies according to the competition in the targeted demographic.

Once you've set up your campaign, you can track its progress through Facebook's analytics dashboard. From there, you can see which ads are performing the best. You can also modify your spending accordingly.

Twitter's Advertisement

As a more simpler social media, Twitter's advertisement suite is also much simpler. Ads on Twitter are divided into 2 categories: Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. (A third ad product, Promoted Trends, isn't available to small businesses.)

Promoted Tweets are ideal when you want to advertise a specific message, or product, in a form of what Twitter is best known for, tweets. If your goal is getting new followers, promoting your account is the most efficient method, as you'll have to pay only when have new followers. It's worth testing whether promoting a specific message, or having more followers, is more profitable for your small business.

With ads on Twitter, small businesses can opt for two kinds of targeting. The first is by keyword, which will allow you to target those who search, tweet about or otherwise engage with a specific term. And the second is targeting by interests and followers, reaching people who fall into certain broad interest categories or who follow specific accounts. Advertisers can also limit their targeting to certain devices, like Android, and by gender.

Once all is set, budget always comes last. You can set lifetime and daily maximum budgets for your campaign. If you're running a Promoted Tweet campaign, you set the amount you're willing to pay every time someone retweets, replies, favorites, follows or clicks on your tweet. For Promoted Account campaigns, you pay per follower.

Beyond Facebook and Twitter

While small business participation on Facebook and Twitter is particularly high, companies may find that other networks have a better strategic fit. Pinterest, for example, has become essential to women's lifestyle publishers, accounting for as much as 10 percent of their monthly referral traffic. Tumblr and LinkedIn may also be worth exploring, depending on your target customer demographic and other needs.

B2B marketers usually use LinkedIn as their social network of choice for a good reason. But that doesn't mean that you can't create one for Facebook because according to a study, 43 percent of B2B companies have acquired customers through Facebook.

"You'll never know what works until you try." Every business can implement different strategy. And a strategy that works on someone may not work well on others. The best thing to know how a campaign performs is by trying it in the first place. With your strategy well created, you and your business can spear ahead in the virtual world.