You know the saying in social media: Content is King. I’ve been hearing that for about a decade; but today, “content” has been dethroned by social media advertising dollars.
Let’s face it, when Facebook went public you could have the greatest content in the world and it might only reach 15 percent of your page’s likes/followers. All in the sake of driving revenue for Facebook, we lost that great customer/advocate relationship because we now have to pay to get in front of them.
Today, as social media companies are driven by their bottom line and revenue, smart companies have seen the value of social media advertising. We have also seen this benefit for our own clients here at Commonwealth PR and our own company as well.
There are now more than 50 million small businesses using Facebook Pages to connect with their customers (Source: Facebook). Four million of those businesses pay for social media advertising on Facebook. (Source: Forbes) The social media advertising statistics show that small-sized companies should consider paying for Facebook ads in order to gain visibility and surpass competitors relatively easily, according to the social media news/trends website DreamGrow.
As PR professionals, our agency team consists of content creators. We write press releases, blogs, newsletter articles, letters, and social media content. In the case of social media though, over time we started to realize that no matter how great our content was it needed a little extra boost, (literally if you’re talking about Facebook).
Like many companies we started by throwing a few dollars around to see what would happen. While some interesting increases were experienced, it just didn’t seem strategic and before long we started to realize that we needed to shift our approach. That’s when we amped-up our efforts by hiring experts and attending conferences so we could learn how to show clients the way.
Many companies miss the mark in social media because they are not leveraging the benefits that advertising will bring to their social media channels. It’s not difficult, but there is a science to it. That science (advertising), when applied strategically to most of the top social media channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will result in several achievements:
- Targeting a specific individual based on their demographics, geographic location, interests and online habits.
- Increasing brand awareness and the chance that a customer or potential customer will act in some way that you want them to.
- Driving traffic to your website. With most of Commonwealth PR’s social media advertising clients, we are seeing a 30 percent increase in traffic migrating from social media to our client’s website all through social media advertising.
While the practice of throwing $20 behind a post is not one that we recommend, in some cases thousands of dollars invested month after month isn’t needed, if you’re strategic in how you invest in reaching your target audience. When you are strategic about who you’re targeting, your advertising dollars will go much further.
Yes, when it comes to social media, content is important because you have to create good solid content that engages your target audiences. However, if you can’t even reach them, then it’s worthless.
If you or your company is struggling with social media and pondering if social media advertising could help, give us a call. Let’s talk about your business goals and audience and we’ll be able to quickly tell you if we think social media advertising will move the needle for you.
