Advertising on Social Media

By: Damaris Villalva, Junior Marketing Associate — Published: March 11, 2019

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Advertising online and reaching millions of people has never been easier than today. Even if there is an opportunity to reach thousands of people, how do we make them take action? (I.e. liking, commenting, and sharing.)  At Vision Care Connect, that is something we aim to solve and strive to improve for every single one of our clients.

As a young adult, I can relate to the fact that there seems to be an overload of ads and too much information thrown at you all at once on social media. A majority of the time, I barely glance at an ad for more than 3 seconds. There are many things that a company needs to keep in mind when advertising on social media.  

The two most important tips I can give you are:

1. Be creative (in order to grab viewers attention) and use the right channels

2. Choose the correct channel to advertise. This is key in effectively reaching your target market.       

Some of the major social media advertising channels are:
Snapchat - Younger people (78% are ages 18-24)
Instagram - Most are younger than 35
Facebook - All ages
Twitter - All Ages  

Why Advertise on Social Media?

1. Inexpensive

2. Tailored to  individual needs

3. Accessible to mobile users

Inexpensive
Everybody loves to save money, so why waste money on things that won’t give you the desired results? Traditional advertising can be expensive, (such as billboards, TV, and magazines) while delivering the same results- or less, do to the limited amount of people that will see it. On the other hand, social media platforms are more affordable and easily accessed by anyone having control over the target market whether it's by age, location, gender etc. The number of people that you will be able to reach will depend on your budget. The budget that is used can be easily changed based on the company’s needs. When it comes to reaching your local community or the entire world, it can easily be done with the help of social media advertising.  

Tailored to Individual Needs
One of the great things about social media is that it can be tailored to anyone's needs from a small to big company. There is complete control of how, what, when, and where you want your ad based on your company's needs. An advantage of using social media is that it gives you the opportunity to gain valuable information from users such as interests, behavior, activities, and who is most likely to react to an ad. With this, there is even more data that can be used to further improve how to target a specific audience.

Access to Mobile Users
Like many of you, I cannot live without my phone. This fact makes it possible for companies to be able to reach people anywhere and anytime.  Mobile users are a big part of making a company successful because most of the traffic happens on mobile phones and app devices. 90% of Vision Care Connect’s traffic is on mobile devices and this is the case for many others. One must embrace advertising to mobile users because smartphones have changed how we communicate, work, and live.      

When to Engage: Always
One of the biggest challenges on social media is that there can be too much noise, too many ads. In return, your ads are often overlooked. Getting people to engage with your page will make the difference. One must interact with people on your social media pages, and your goal should be to start a conversation and content engagement. Positive comments, constructive comments, negative comments, and even spam should be handled accordingly. Negative comments should not be overlooked because they can potentially have a negative effect on an advertisement.

As I mentioned before, many times I barely look at an ad for more than 3 seconds. Capturing the viewer's attention in the first few seconds and continuing to build momentum is key to obtaining a reaction from them. Being creative with an ad from beginning to end is not an easy task, but it must be memorable to the viewer. Another final piece of information that needs to be kept in mind when advertising on Facebook, is to let it do its thing. Facebook uses complex algorithms to target people. These algorithms decide what content to show particular people based on what it learns by collecting data from users.

Today social media can help reach thousands of people or even the entire world! It’s a great tool to supplement existing growth strategies or even as the main advertising strategy.

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