Almost 90% of all small businesses use Facebook to advertise their goods and services, yet only about 60% of those companies say that the Facebook ads are accomplishing the intended business objectives. Since the cost of advertising on the popular social medium rose nearly 40% last year, it might be time for your company’s advertising and marketing personnel to consider using other social media in addition to Facebook, in order to achieve the best return on your marketing spend.
LinkedIn advertising
LinkedIn advertising and posting is a terrific bargain at present, because the medium has not severely refined its publishing process, as has Facebook, and this means you can still have a powerful organic reach on LinkedIn. Organic reach is the total number of potential customers who actually have a chance to see your post, without there being any kind of paid distribution factor involved. While Facebook has been consistently diminishing this reach in recent years, and making it harder to achieve a reasonable ROI, this is not yet true of LinkedIn. As long as someone in your business, or someone whom you’ve hired as an influencer, engages regularly with your audience, your posts will be near the top of targeted feeds.
But there is another factor which is just as compelling – LinkedIn is generally frequented by business professional types, and these individuals represent high-quality leads who are probably your ideal customer types. Compare that audience to the more generalized clientele on Facebook, which can be filled with all manner of users, many of whom have zero interest in products or services of any kind. It will also be worth your while to produce videos which are intended for the LinkedIn audience, where the prevalence of videos is not nearly at the Facebook level, and that means yours is more likely to be seen.
Twitter advertising
For some of the same reasons that LinkedIn has advantages over Facebook, so does Twitter. It costs less and can be said to have a more professional audience – but there’s one more reason which may not be as generally well known. Twitter now has a free tool called the Twitter Advanced Search, which allows you to discover the most used keywords by users from a specific location or region. This could tell you a lot about your competition for one thing, and it can also tell you what matters most to users in your area, because that’s what they’re tweeting about. You can gain a lot of very useful information with this tool, that will help you be more competitive, and will help you to provide what your customers really want.
Instagram advertising
Since Instagram is wholly owned by Facebook, it has the same kind of access to user information that its parent does, and that is a very large database of individuals indeed. Since Instagram is largely frequented by millenials and those who consider it a much more modern and cool social medium than its Facebook cousin, you’ll have access to an entirely new audience that Facebook might lack. During a six-month period of 2017, the number of advertisers on Instagram doubled, which is a clear indication that many business owners have discovered the value of accessing the different audience engendered by the Instagram social medium.
The last word
While advertising on Facebook is by no means a thing of the past, and it can still provide value, you would be prudent as a small business owner to consider the advantages offered by other social media as well. You can reach new audiences, achieve a more visible presence in the social media, and spend a lot less, by considering the possibilities offered by each of the major platforms.
Don’t try to do it yourself
As an entrepreneur or small business owner, your focus is on launching and scaling your business. If you don’t have the in-house personnel to execute your social media marketing strategies, hire a San Diego marketing firm to ensure that your objectives are achieved. Social media marketing is often more effective when left up to the experts who work in that arena on a daily basis. Contact us to learn more about how we can help grow your small business.
