Social Media Advertising has become an affordable alternative to traditional advertising methods, which were formerly quite costly. This new approach is popular among both corporations and individuals for promoting their brands due to its sizeable audience reach that extends not only locally but also internationally. As a result of this considerable market potential coupled with reduced expenses, many businesses and independent advertisers alike have opted for Social Media as the preferred platform when marketing their products or services. In summary then, we can define Social Media Advertising as a cost-effective means of reaching diverse audiences on vast online platforms through targeted campaigns tailored towards specific objectives such as brand awareness building or product promotion purposes.
Digital advertising through social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google Ads is commonly referred to as Social Media Advertising. This form of advertisement can be paid or non-paid and takes various forms such as blogs articles, news bites or videos created using tools like promo video ad maker or video maker software. Microblogging platforms like Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr are also used for this purpose.
Now let’s examine the five most effective types of Social Media Advertising in 2024 by analyzing popular digital marketing channels.
Facebook Advertising
Facebook has become a common household name that engages more than 1.88 billion daily users translating to a reach of 2.85 billion monthly users as of March 2021. The widespread usage of Facebook is because users like large businesses, small businesses, and start-up entrepreneurs can reach their exact target market. Facebook advertising allows users to increase their brand awareness, attracting leads and effectively turning leads into customers.
Advertisements on Facebook are either video adverts, Photo adverts, and branding adverts and it is really easy to edit and put up an ad on Facebook with a simple app like Facetune’s Facebook photo editor app.
LinkedIn Advertising
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network having 756 million members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Many professionals post their individual and company blogs, success stories, data presentations, upcoming events, and learning workshop advertisements.
Companies also use this platform for advertising job positions and engagement with other professionals in their profession. LinkedIn is a good marketing platform as the target market is large and can be localized.
Twitter Advertising
Twitter is best known for microblogging, social networking, and breaking news. As of March 2021, Twitter had 119 million daily users evenly split between male and female users, with 500 million tweets per day. In terms of generating business, companies use Twitter as an audience engagement platform.
Companies tweet about events, products, social activities directly to their followers, tagging similar companies or those they target for comments or awareness. Followers readily engage with microblogs when asking questions and directly getting feedback from the companies. Therefore, Twitter is a great platform to advertise for B2B market engagement. Companies do not need to pay for advertising.
YouTube Advertising
YouTuber ranks as the most popular search engine for videos capturing over 2 billion users per day. YouTube is also the third-largest social media platform. ‘How-to’ videos, short advertisements, microblogs, and shows generate advertisements.
Instagram Advertising
Instagram is the top platform where audiences search for photos and videos of products and services. The more engaging a video is, the more the target market is accessible to it. Instagram has Monthly Active Users of 1.074 billion-plus with 200 Million plus business accounts visited every day.
With all this information, whichever Social Media platform you use to advertise depends on:-
- Where is your target market concentrated (Local, national, or international)?
- Which target market demographics (gender, age, race, and others) do you want to reach with your adverts?
- Which social media platform is readily available to your target market and has the most traffic engagement?
To understand the type of advertising to engage in, conducting market research and market demographics is vital.