By Joe McKivitt, Account Manager.
Successful paid promotion relies on you knowing what to aim for. Here’s how to put together a winning strategy for social ads on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Setting your social strategy.
So, at this point in the series, you should already be well aware of why you need to invest in paid promotion for your social channels. And you should know the four actions you can take to make your content stand out from the crowd.
The next step is to look at a more specific strategy for your paid promotion campaigns. After all, you don’t want to sink all that time and effort into creating killer content, without any idea of how you’ll use it.
To make sure your content connects, you need to know what your end goal is, and how to get there. So, in this article, I’ll take you through the ins and outs of B2B’s two favourite social channels — Twitter and LinkedIn.
Top tips for Twitter paid promotion.
Right, let’s start with Twitter, which gives you the choice of three kinds of ad:
- Promoted tweets (messages that appear in target users’ timelines).
- Promoted accounts (ads that invite targeted users to follow your account).
- Promoted trends (a hashtag that puts your story at the top of the trending topics list).
They all have different costs and outcomes, so you need to know which one works best for you.
Start by deciding what you want to achieve from your paid campaign. Is it more clicks, engagement or followers? Next, think about the type of campaign you need to set up to achieve this result.
For website clicks or conversion campaigns, promote tweets to people you want clicking through to your landing page. Twitter then charges you for every click — in much the same way as pay-per-click (PPC) works on Google.
If you want to increase engagement, promoted tweets are still a good option. But this time, you aim to start conversations about your brand — changing the type of content you’ll create. You then pay for the initial engagement created by your ads.
When looking to attract new followers, a good tactic is to promote your Twitter account — and pay per follower you gain. However, you can also generate followers by paying to promote your top content. If they like what they see on your profile, there’s a good chance they’ll follow you.
Promoted trends are great for attracting new followers and encouraging engagement. However, they’re far less targeted than promoted tweets — and much more expensive as well. If you want to start a widespread discussion on a topic relevant to your brand, then this is the way to do it.
Landing new business with LinkedIn.
Next up is LinkedIn, which has five types of ad:
- Display ads (ads that share content with a target audience).
- Text ads (text-based ads that appear on the right-hand side of the site).
- Dynamic ads (like display ads, but appear on the right-hand side of the site).
- Sponsored InMail (messages that deliver sponsored content directly to LinkedIn user inboxes).
- Sponsored content (makes your content appear in the timelines of your target audience).
LinkedIn lets you choose whether to pay using the cost-per-click (CPC) model, or by every 1,000 impressions — also known as cost-per-mile (CPM). However, LinkedIn sets a minimum budget of $10 per day, per campaign. There are also minimum bids for CPC text ads ($2 per click) and CPM text ads ($2 per 1,000 impressions).
With these minimum bids, it’s vital for you to seriously consider your objective when creating LinkedIn ads. It’ll make it easier to work out which ad works best for your brand, and how much your end goal might cost.
Keep your ads business-focused — Facebook and Twitter provide much cheaper alternatives for soft-sell content. Make sure you test a few LinkedIn ads and see whether the price is worth it for your business.
Making the right choice for you.
So that’s a quick rundown of paid promotion in Twitter and LinkedIn. Ultimately, if you only have a small budget and are trialling paid promotion, I recommend starting with Twitter. It’s cheaper, and gives you a chance to analyse how effective your content is.
Saying that, LinkedIn — although more expensive — can net you some spectacular results. And, if you have the money to spend, it’s a great option for boosting your social media presence. In the campaigns we’ve run, we’ve seen an influx of followers for company pages, even when that wasn’t our key goal. That’s why a really strong piece of content earns you a lot more than you planned for.
Whatever you’re looking to achieve, try a number of different options when setting up your campaigns to see what works for you, and what doesn’t. Also, I’d recommend visiting Twitter’s campaign optimisation pages for more detailed advice, and LinkedIn has some information you can read here.
Get in touch with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or via email at joseph@asabell.co.uk — whether it’s just to connect, or to see how we can help you improve your social media strategy or B2B marketing campaigns.
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