The No BS Guide To Social Media Advertising

www.socialmedia-authority.com

The No BS Guide To Social Media Advertising On Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin

1

The No BS Guide To Social Media Advertising On Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Copyright © 2016 by Social Media Authority.

Credits: Co-authored by Travis Hunter and Richard Santoro

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including

photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,

without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the

case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other

non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission

requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions

Coordinator,” at the email address below.

[email protected]

Ordering Information:

Quantity redistribution or sales opportunities and discounts are

available on purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For

details, contact the publisher at the email address above.

http://socialmedia-authority.com/

mailto:[email protected]



2

Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 3

Choosing the right social media channel ................................................................................................ 4

Twitter ................................................................................................................................................. 4

Facebook ............................................................................................................................................. 5

Linkedin ............................................................................................................................................... 5

Network .............................................................................................................................................. 5

Engagement ........................................................................................................................................ 5

Reach ................................................................................................................................................... 5

Twitter – Create a personality for your brand ........................................................................................ 6

Tweet engagements ............................................................................................................................ 6

Website clicks ...................................................................................................................................... 8

App installs .......................................................................................................................................... 8

Video views ......................................................................................................................................... 9

Followers ............................................................................................................................................. 9

Lead generation ................................................................................................................................ 10

Measurement.................................................................................................................................... 10

Best practices .................................................................................................................................... 11

Facebook – Everyone is here. Where are you? .................................................................................... 12

Setting up facebook ads .................................................................................................................... 14

Boosted posts.................................................................................................................................... 15

Promoting a page .............................................................................................................................. 15

Best practices to follow on Facebook pages ..................................................................................... 16

Do not sell but engage .................................................................................................................. 16

Respond promptly ......................................................................................................................... 16

Pictures and videos ....................................................................................................................... 17

Create clear call to action ............................................................................................................. 17

Measurement.................................................................................................................................... 17

Linkedin – The white collar marketer’s abode ...................................................................................... 17

Display ads ........................................................................................................................................ 19

Sponsored updates ........................................................................................................................... 20




3

Sponsored InMail .............................................................................................................................. 20

PPC ads .............................................................................................................................................. 21

Measurement.................................................................................................................................... 22

Best practices .................................................................................................................................... 22

Target effectively .......................................................................................................................... 22

Create resonating content ............................................................................................................ 22

Specific call to action ..................................................................................................................... 23

Rounding it all up .................................................................................................................................. 23

Be human .......................................................................................................................................... 23

Talk informally................................................................................................................................... 23

Pictures talk....................................................................................................................................... 24

Talk less. Talk often ........................................................................................................................... 25

Hashtag ............................................................................................................................................. 25

Tell them what to do ......................................................................................................................... 26

Target wisely ..................................................................................................................................... 26

Introduction Imagine the following scenarios in which you come across this article. 1. A close friend of you who shares a lot

of similar opinions has read this article and he liked it. He suggested that you should give it a read too. 2. You

walk through the aisle of a magazine store and the headline of this article screams for attention from amongst

dozens of similar articles on the news stand. 3. One fine day you wanted to know about social media

advertising and you choose to look it up online. This article pops up at the top of search results with a label

saying ‘Sponsored’.

Now close your eyes for a moment and reflect on the three scenarios. In which case are you most likely to read

the article fully to its completion? Hands down, several people will favour the first scenario when asked this

question. In a nutshell, these three scenarios are depictions of social advertising, display advertising and paid

searches respectively.

Just as this article has enough value in it for you and still yearns to get your attention, hundreds and thousands

of businesses are cracking their heads with thoughts on the ideal marketing budgets for various advertising

routes to take their valuable product to their audience. If you have not yet taken social media advertising

seriously into account, it is high time now that you read this article and optimize your advertising budget with

enough meat given to social media advertsing. Why?




4

1. The world of marketing is going in this direction and you don’t want to feel left behind. The total

amount spent on social media advertising in 2015 was $23 bn. This number is predicted to go up to

$35 bn by 2017. The rising numbers spent on social media advertising year-on-year tells a clear tale

about the next big thing in advertising.

2. It fits every pocket and makes sound economic sense. Social media ads are remarkable in their

flexibility, thereby making them suitable for both Coca-cola type brands and the home-made

chocolate store down your street. It offers a wide range of options to set up an ad and hence he who

uses it wisely will extract the most out of it. The returns on investment are amazing and as a

marketer, this surely will be your wet dream.

3. It is real and personal. Remember the three scenarios mentioned above? It is designed to be a very

real and personal referral experience and hence the credibility shoots way up above other channels of

advertising. 70% of social media advertisers are so happy with the results that they are inclined to

increase their social media spending.

4. While all this is good to know, I can sense the mischievous smile on your face where you are thinking

that you will ride this wave of social media success with a good strategy through organic growth. If

you are wondering what is organic growth, ‘organic reach’ in social media terms is the reach to your

content achieves naturally without any advertising push. ‘Inorganic’ is the boosted reach for your

content. Hold on for a moment. Social media channels are also replying to your mischievous smile

with their own version of it as you are reading this. They had lured you into social media till now by

giving good buck for your content with organic reach and now they are tweaking their algorithms so

that the inorganic route is simply inevitable.

In short, if you are bedazzled by the stats or blown over by the benefits or coerced into submission, you must

advertise on social media one way or the other. So do it wisely! It can be the best thing that ever happened to

your business in recent times.

Choosing the right social media channel Although there are several social media channels, let us confine ourselves to the top three that give you the

maximum returns for your advertising- Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Let us take a moment to understand

the difference and similarities among these three.

Twitter Twitter is a brilliant broadcasting medium where you can create a persona for your brand and post engaging

and crisp tweets to your followers. It boasts of 316m monthly active users and about 500m tweets are floated




5

every day. The best thing about it is that 80% of twitter users are active users on mobile. Anything of interest

happening on the planet gets discussed on Twitter and successful brands piggyback on the events that are

relevant to them and participate in the discussions with their own take. It is primarily a brand maintenance

medium ideal to create a personality for your brand.

Facebook Facebook is the big daddy of social networks with its unbeatable user base. As of 2015, facebook had 1.44

billion monthly active users with around 20,000 people active on the platform every second. Facebook allows

businesses to set up a page and even run business through the page. Posts from businesses are also shown

along with posts from friends on the newsfeed of people thereby having a higher chance of visibility. However

recent policies of facebook are focussed on limiting organic content from businesses lesser and lesser. For the

user, it promises more and more content from friends who matter and for businesses, it means that the free

lunch is over. For brands with a good budget and a strategy, facebook can drive sales and goodwill like no

other medium can.

Linkedin

Linkedin is essentially a B2B platform suited for the white-collared types. More than 3 million businesses have

a Linkedin page and 1 out of 3 professionals in the planet are active on linkedin. That is how this platform has

penetrated the corporate world. The size of the audience in Linkedin is smaller than the other two platforms

but the quality is greater as people in this platform are already open for communications from brands and

businesses on matters of sales, recruitment and other opportunities. There is no need to be subtle in Linkedin

by packaging your sales content to go with the friendly banter of your friends and this is the biggest advantage

that Linkedin offers to a marketer.

Just as we see that each of these platforms has carved a niche for themselves, they do have a lot in common

too.

Network All these channels thrive on networking. People connect with other people and connecting with one means

tapping into one’s network. This gives unprecedented reach for brands to new targets.

Engagement People visit these platforms daily and constantly engage in creating and sharing content. There is something

new every minute and so you are constantly engaging with your audience. Consumers can directly connect

with the brands without any hassles.

Reach Word spreads fast, both good and bad. These platforms are great channels to make your good name spread

virally. All that goodwill will convert to sales too at the same pace.

Based on the nature of your business and your target audience, you must choose the platforms that suit you

and create an engaging presence there. Successful brands are active on more than one platforms.

Now let us see what each channel has to offer exclusively in terms of advertising.




6

Twitter – Create a personality for your brand

Twitter gives you a wide range of options in advertising based on your specific campaign objectives. Here is the

summary of all options available.

Tweet engagements In simple terms, these are promoted tweets that are shown to a wider audience even outside the base of your

followers. These are ideal if you are having a good presence already and are promoting a specific tweet in

which you are talking about a new product launch, an offer or an event. Here is how companies are using

promoted tweets to maximise interactions on these tweets.




7

That is how your tweet appears in a user’s timeline. It gets into the timeline amidst the stream of tweets he

has subscribed to. It is imperative to make a tweet awesome before spending money on it to reach people.

What can you do about it?

Look at this tweet from Pepsi.

The ICC World T20 is a global sporting event very popularly followed in India and Pepsi is riding on the event to

engage its followers. It is running a unique campaign #PepsiMojiT20 for this event and is promoting the link to

participate in it via this tweet. The incentive to participate is clearly indicated with the grand prize i.e. the

tickets to the finals of the World T20. There is a specific call for action and a clear incentive to participate. The

language is also informal and short to the point. Besides, Pepsi has also used a picture featuring an Indian

celebrity endorsing the brand. Pictures are always great in a newsfeed filled with words to garner attention.

That is the route to go to make your tweet awesome before promoting it.




8

Website clicks

Website cards are the new cool additions to Twitter ads where you convert a picture in your tweet into a card

that takes a user directly to a target website. These cards are ideal if you want to convert clicks into leads. You

can set your company’s website or the brand’s website or even the link to a specific campaign page or a

product page as target and lure your audience into clicking the post. This brings them from Twitter into your

website where you want the action to happen.

The best thing is that Twitter also allows you to track clicks and conversions on these cards through their

analytics. You get to know exactly how much of your web traffic is influenced by Twitter and if you see

promising results in it, you can up the ante.

App installs Twitter is ideal to drive app installs since a majority of Twitter users are active through mobile devices. A

whopping 80% is the number that Twitter boasts of for its mobile user pie. Intuitively, you get maximum

installs of apps to a user’s mobile if you get your ad right.

The ad features a link to install the app within the tweet and allows you to generate a buzz around it by

posting a crisp tweet along with it.




9

Video views They say that a thousand words cannot match the impact of a picture. Twitter is even more stringent and you

can only fit as many as a few dozens of words within their 144 character limit. But a picture or a video can add

more to your post and drive its reach to a wider audience.

This is similar to a promoted tweet but instead it gives you the added advantage of streaming a video right in

the newsfeed. Twitter has worked smartly to build its native video player and this feature is now in the Beta

stage. Instead of sharing the link for a YouTube video and driving a user outside Twitter for a brief while when

he is interested to watch that video, now you can get all the action right there.

Followers This is the most basic of all objectives to advertise in Twitter. You can be awesome but you need to have a

following to drive engagement and sales. That is why you advertise to let the world know about your presence

and give them suggestions to follow you.

That is how your ad appears in a user’s timeline. This ad is effective when you are new to Twitter and are

looking to build a base first before working on other objectives in marketing. When you are just launching a

new account dedicated to a product, a brand or an event, advertising the account will give you a big following

initially. It also adds to the credibility of your account when you see a big number of users following you. By

the way, Katy Perry’s account as you see there is the most popular twitter account in the US. She follows a

mere 159 people but a staggering 85.4M people follow her.




10

Lead generation

As a marketer, you are always eager to know more details about the people whom you touch with your

marketing efforts. In this marketing funnel, twitter is gaining a significant place by allowing you to capture

valuable information about a prospective customer and identifying people who are ready to convert. You can

run lead generation campaigns and simply download the leads as a document for follow-up action.

Thus Twitter advertising helps you with a varied range of options – from shouting at the top of your voice to

seeking attention to closing the deal with that one final push towards the ‘Install’ button.

Measurement Twitter has really worked hard on its analytics and critics are impressed with its ability to give meaningful

information to marketers. The new Tweet activity dashboard packs enough information to let you know when

your tweets went crazy, which of your tweets gave the maximum desired impact and when you should step up

the gas on the pedal. This is the progress report on your organic performance and this gives you the best idea

to pick which tweets to promote and steer inorganic success with it.

For the ads, Twitter gives you dashboards for each of your ads with rich data about the impressions, followers,

engagement and follow rates, demographic details of audience and also a clean A/B testing interface. You can

tweak your ads till you make them perfectly optimized for maximum impact.




11

Twitter, though small in numbers compared to Facebook on the number of active users, punches above its

weight according to this report by Wordstream, which compares the performance of Twitter and Facebook in

ads.

Look at two key numbers on this comparison. Twitter has promoted a 300% growth on revenue per user year-

on-year as against 39% by facebook. And the click through rate is 1-3% in Twitter as against a mere 0.119% in

Facebook. Clearly, Twitter gives you a smaller but more profitable audience than Facebook. This helps in

greater conversion rates and that comes at a cost, which is why you see the cost for Twitter ads slightly higher

than those of Facebook.

Best practices To be successful in Twitter, here is what you have to know.

- Create a strong persona: Twitter is driven by personalities. Pick a persona for your brand and build it

day by day with organic tweet activity.

- Identify marketing objectives: There are a lot of options to advertise. Know why you want to

advertise on Twitter. This also helps you in determining the right metrics to measure your success.

- Correct target audience: Pinpointing the right target audience will help you to achieve the perfect

audience-content fit.

- Monitor progress continuously: Do not just sit back once you set an ad in motion. Monitor its

progress continuously and tweak it till you attain maximization.




12

Facebook – Everyone is here. Where are you?

Finding your right target audience is the primary key to cost effective success in facebook advertising. In 2014,

Facebook revealed that there are over 40 million small businesses owning a facebook page. After years and

years of building the user base, facebook is now aggressively capitalizing on advertisements for revenue

generation. This is why facebook ads are no more cheap as they once used to be. Facebook reported in its Q3

2014 earnings that facebook ad prices have gone up by 247% and since then they are constantly on the rise

too. So, as a marketer, you cannot cast the net wide open with the hope that your customer is somewhere

there. You need to know where he is and smartly target him to achieve maximum benefit out of facebook ads.

In addition to this, the constantly changing policies of facebook are also a challenge for a marketer to keep

track of. Facebook commits to deliver a newsfeed to its users with a majority of content from their own friends

and it encourages only a small portion of promotional content organically. This ensures that the average

facebook user gets a feed with less promotional pressures and the businesses that still advertise on the

platform are serious about what they are doing.

However, it is not without reason that it is the numero uno of all social networking sites and all businesses are

flocking to create a presence on facebook despite the odds.




13

Facebook handsomely overtakes all other social networking sites in keeping a user hooked in. Where the

crowd goes, you go as a marketer. Facebook differentiates a person and a business unlike twitter in the type of

accounts they own. Facebook encourages businesses to own a page rather than an account to interact with

the customers.

Facebook pages are improving as perfect places to create a fan base. Facebook has built this social proof to

advertising which makes it hard to resist for a marketer. When you visit a facebook page of a business, it also

shows who among your friends have already liked the page. This creates a compelling reason for a user to join

the club where his peers are already in. This adds to the credibility of the brand on a different level. A study

revealed that 49% of consumers like a facebook page to support the brand. They act as ambassadors to the

brand on their own will and imagine the potential of the platform to create an army of ambassadors for your

brand on the virtual world!




14

With its unmatched user base, facebook promises the highest probability to find the intended target audience

in all social networks. It lets you reach 89% of your intended audience when you run a campaign. Naturally, it

has earned a place akin to a media channel which owns a billion eyeballs.

Setting up facebook ads Facebook helps businesses streamline their advertising campaigns greatly by handholding them through the

set up process of an ad campaign. It gives a multitude of options just like Twitter based on the marketing

objective. But broadly, the ads are either targeted to promote a particular post or the page in general.

It allows businesses to raise awareness about custom offers exclusive to facebook, create events and

encourage signups, drive traffic to the website from facebook and drive the end goal like purchase decision or

install decision (in case of apps) directly from the page itself.




15

Boosted posts Boosted posts are great ways to take a particularly interesting post to a maximum number of users beyond the

reach of the brand through organic means. Brands are constantly generating various posts on their page and it

makes sound sense to identify the top performing ones and give them an added boost through advertising to

take them even farther.

Promoting a page Page promotion is the best way to constantly raise the fan base of the brand. Successful brands on Facebook

have a very good content strategy to drive organic growth. Advertising is more effective to those who already

generate engaging posts. Big brands are challenging each other in beefing up the number of their fans to




16

millions and billions whereas small businesses are pumping their fists on crossing each thousand. Whichever

your size is, you always keep an eye on the first number on a page i.e. the number of likes.

In a well balanced approach, marketers allot a small portion of their budget to constantly promote their page

and spend the larger chunk to divide between all other ad campaigns.

With the depth of demographic and psychographic information that facebook has about each of its users, it

allows for segmentation and targeting in previously unimaginable levels. Advertisers can target highly specific

groups of people based on their location, age, sex and other likes. This is the advantage that lets even small

businesses to smartly target the exact segment they have their eyes on.

Facebook page posts also provide specific call to action through their CTA buttons. Invariably, most marketers

prefer the ‘shop now’ button over the others as this study reveals. But on the other side of the spectrum, users

prefer the ‘Learn more’ button mostly. The lesson to be learnt here is to find a balance between selling and

engaging. This is the Holy Grail that marketers are chasing on facebook pages.

Best practices to follow on Facebook pages

Do not sell but engage An active Facebook page is going to generate posts that appear on a user’s newsfeed more than twice

or thrice a week on an average. You do not want to register your brand in the minds of the user as

that annoying brand that tries to push its product down one’s throat. Instead, focus more on engaging

the user through content that conveys the attitude of the brand and make them participate in

promoting your brand. Engaging content gets shared and goes viral on Facebook like no other

platform and takes your brand to a wider base. The objective is to appease your fans and not to sell

blindly.

Respond promptly Customers are openly participating in conversations with brands on facebook now and the response

time of brands plays a major role in their reputation. Brands like Amazon have succeeded in building

an excellent reputation as a customer-first business by being prompt in their responses. Facebook

pages also show the average response time to messages from customers nowadays.




17

Pictures and videos Facebook is the medium where most of the pictures and videos are getting consumed, shared and

spread virally on the internet. Anything that you say with words can be conveyed more powerfully in

a picture and even more so in a video. Create content in this format which is inspiring, fun,

informative and attractive.

Create clear call to action Make use of the call to action feature on your facebook page. Drive all your goodwill and reputation

towards this button to consummate the marriage between your brand and the consumer. Studies

show that the overall click-through-rate increases 2.5x times just by adding a CTA button. You can

choose from a variety of actions – Shop now, Book now, Learn More, Sign Up and Download.

Measurement Facebook likes to spoil you with choice in giving insights about your page and the ad campaigns. They allow

you to extract all possible metrics of value – ranging from reach, unique clicks, CTR, conversion rate,

engagement rate, demographic profile of the audience and much more. Each of your campaigns comes with a

separate dashboard and you can find which of your boosted posts performed well and which ones bombed.

This will help you to identify what you did right or wrong and optimize your campaigns the next time for

maximum reach.

Linkedin – The white collar marketer’s abode

While facebook and twitter are great to engage in conversations with consumers, Linkedin is the place to be

for B2B deals. It boasts of over 300 million users and more than 3 million company pages. Over 25 million

profiles are viewed on Linkedin every day and more than 35% of users log in to their account daily. These are

impressive statistics for a networking site that positions itself as a formal business place. Linkedin groups and

pages are primed for conversions since they are open platforms to drive sales and talk business. You do not

need to place your sales message subtly packed inside a cat video on Linkedin to reach the audience and hence

it is most preferred in cases of white collar business deals where value plays the lead game and not emotions.




18

Over 200 conversions happen every minute on Linkedin groups as per studies and this is a mindboggling

number. Nearly 50% of users have reported that they are likely to buy from a company they follow in Linkedin

and over 80% people have expressed a willingness to connect with companies on this platform. In business

terms, Linkedin provides direct access to decision makers in organizations and hence the objectives are met

quite effectively. Another huge advantage in Linkedin is that there are very few fake profiles because of its

professional nature. People are constantly trying to put forward their best professional side in an attempt to

market themselves, get themselves discovered and hired, thereby making it an ideal candidate for effective

targeting.

Setting up a company page in Linkedin has several benefits for a business. Naturally, each company has a

following in the form of its employees but there are a lot of others outside the company keeping a watch too.

These could be prospective buyers, prospective employees or even competing companies. Maintaining a good

reputation on Linkedin can work wonders for any company.

The algorithm of Linkedin feeds information about the company in the form of blog posts, status posts, videos,

infographics etc. to its followers. Besides original content generated by the company’s admins, they can also

ask to get feeds from trending topics relevant to their business to keep the feed live and active.

Linkedin offers three different types of advertising for marketers as follows.




19

Display ads

Linkedin has smartly blended the display ads of the bygone era into their site in a new form. Such display ads

in Linkedin have very high CTRs because they are very specifically targeted to decision makers with very

relevant messages. These are mainly targeted to build a following for your company’s page so that your

broadcast reaches a wider audience. This is very similar to building a fan base for a facebook page. The perks

that Linkedin offers are a very niche audience ideal to be a perfect fit for your company. Targeting is also easier

in Linkedin because the designations and job roles of people are also part of the data based on which you can

set up a campaign.

Companies like Adobe are great examples for using display ads in Linkedin with success. Adobe is using a

diversified approach to reach decision makers in companies to raise awareness about their marketing cloud

and get more clients onboard. Adobe gives a strong testimonial to the power of Linkedin in increasing their

loyal group of users. As the Director of Marketing at Adobe, Paula Parkes says, Adobe “increased their Linkedin

campaign investment by 33% in 2014 which led to a 270% year-on-year increase in responses”.




20

Sponsored updates

Linkedin has a very niche group of users who login everyday with specific purposes and not to just ‘spend

time’. Some of them may be following your company while there is a vast majority still out there that is not.

Companies adopt sponsored updates for spreading the word about key happenings so that they reach this

wider mass. Sponsored updates are also good because users do not visit the site as often as compared to

facebook and twitter in a day. There is a great chance of your organic post getting lost in the newsfeed’s

clutter. Sponsored updates give priority positioning to your post on the user’s newsfeed and ensures that you

get his eyeballs. This type of ads is suitable for specific offers, product launches, events etc.

Sponsored InMail InMails are very unique to Linkedin. They allow you to connect directly with a one-to-one private message with

your audience. You can now pinpoint your audience to a sample size of one person. Yes, you read it right. Just

one person!




21

InMails are only an improvised upgrade of the classic e-mail marketing, except with a social angle. Linkedin

itself uses InMails to add more users to Linkedin Premium very effectively. In the words of the Senior Product

Marketing Manager of Linkedin Premium, “We have seen a 75% increase in open rate and an 800%+ increase

in conversion rate over traditional email campaigns using sponsored InMail”.

PPC ads If you get the drift, you can spot that Linkedin ads have adopted a unique approach in giving life back to the

old ways like display ads and email marketing with a renovated touch of social networking. In a similar fashion,

they also offer PPC ads (pay per click ads) like the ones appearing on your search results. In fact, for B2B

marketers, Linkedin’s text ads are more effective than the ones offered by Adwords platforms like Google

because of its niche audience. These ads can be customized for various marketing objectives viz., drive traffic

to a website, add followers to a page or prompt users to download information.




22

Measurement Similar to the other two mediums, Linkedin also offers a robust measurement dashboard to monitor the

progress of your campaigns and take informed decisions. It allows a user to see all baseline metrics pertinent

to ads like clicks, impressions, CTR (click through rate) and CPC (cost per click). It allows the admin to generate

several custom reports to share with the marketing managers or the CXOs of the company.

According to KISSMetrics, if you are achieving a CTR of 0.10% at a cost of around $2 per click, you are doing

well in your campaigns. If you are fighting amidst tough competition, the cost can go up to $4-$5 per click too.

However, the conversion rates on clicks match the higher costs since you are making an utimate decision

maker click your ad.

Best practices To make Linkedin ads work to your benefit, you should adopt the best practices prescribed below.

Target effectively This is a platform that allows you to target with pinpoint accuracy. Make the most out of it.

Understand the nature of your ad and its message and think who will be the most appropriate

audience for it. You can target based on industry, company, experience and designation. It is

recommended to experiment with different types of targeting to achieve the right mix. Do not be shy

to run A/B tests on targeting and keep juggling the mix until you know perfectly where to hit.

Create resonating content Even though the platform is a business-based one, nobody will pay you attention if your message is

purely transactional. Create messages that connect with the users by identifying their pain points,

offering them a solution or talking their organization’s language. Your message to a CEO should be

different from that to a middle manager. Use images in your posts and break free from the flood of

text. A good image is always much more valuable than a great post. However if they complement

each other, they create an invincible combination.




23

Specific call to action Your end goal is to close sales but be mindful of the ads here as a starting point in the sales funnel.

B2B sales occur differently from consumer goods. There is not much impulse buying here. Every

purchase decision goes through a series of discussions, meetings, quotations and approvals. So the

‘shop now’ button is not the ideal CTA to use in Linkedin. Instead, focus on getting the user download

a brochure or an infographic and plant the seed in his mind to warm him up. Then approach him

through InMails and ask for a meeting or a demonstration. Use specific CTAs based on your objective

to drive the maximum reach.

Rounding it all up Now, you are no more an amateur in social media advertising. You know about the top three social media

platforms and how they help businesses interact with their audience and how they help advertisers. To round

it all up, whichever platform you choose to be on, here are a few suggestions that will help you to stay clear on

your course to success in achieving maximum customer engagement.

Be human Your business is just a legal entity in the physical world but in the social world, it can do all that a human being

can do. It can develop a unique personality, communicate an attitude, connect with people, make friends,

participate in conversations, make people fall in love with it and be remembered for its character. Be very

careful about the character you are attributing to your business in the social world because word spreads

virally in the social sphere. You can connect with your audience through webcasts, podcasts and live

interactions too like what Samsung does here.

Depending on your business and audience, you can choose to be funny, witty, expert-like, down-to-earth,

charming, arrogant or even patronising in your attitude. But do not be empty without any character.

Talk informally People are taking a break from their physical world filled with deadlines, formal conversations and pressures

to seek refuge in the social world. Do not drive them crazy here too by being very formal. Nobody is going to




24

write tweets with formal salutations and thank you notes. Embrace an informal tone of language and stick to

it.

See how Mango Frooti prefers to go Mango Bango on Twitter. Spice up your language and use colloquialism to

connect with your audience. Be fun.

Pictures talk We cannot stress on this more. Irrespective of the platform you choose, add more life to your content and

posts through good pictures. Avoid stock images wherever possible. Get unique pictures that are exclusive to

you and your business. If you have a line to say, make a digital poster out of it. If you have an essay to share,

get an apt cover picture for it and break the monotony of text with suitable pictures here and there. Our brains

are wired to respond better to pictures than words. Have a profile picture for your brand and a cover picture.

These entities are as important as the logo of your brand.

Most brands prefer to keep their logo as their profile picture and use the cover picture space to communicate

what is new.




25

Talk less. Talk often Successful businesses find a way to constantly be on the eyes of their audiences with crisp posts. If you have

information to share, break it into bite-sized packets of information and package each bite attractively and

schedule them in good intervals. This ensures that you drive your point within the few seconds of attention

you get and also maximize your chances of being noticed by being present often in the newsfeed.

Hashtag Participate in the global trends and use hashtags to ride the wave. Identify the trending topics of the day and

see how you can fit your brand with the trend. Post an interesting spin on it and voila, you are now part of a

trending topic. This helps you reach out to people outside your network and add more followers to your page.

#IndvsWI is a cricket match alright. But see how NDTV Food makes its own recipe out of cricket. With some

imagination and creativity, you can fit your brand into any trend. Start today.




26

Respond quickly. You want people to talk to you on the social media. So be available to them always and be

prompt in responding. Your response time is also displayed to the public on your page. Remember that.

Who will like to message a business that takes ages to respond?

Tell them what to do Once you succeed in getting your target audience to give you attention, tell them what to do very clearly.

Optimize your campaigns with specific call-to-action buttons. Beat the iron when it is red hot.

Target wisely Do not get carried away by the numbers. ‘Everybody’ is not the right target for any campaign. Understand your

objective, audience and brand and make the most of the smart targeting options offered to you by the social

media. Do not sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

That’s it. You are one step away from starting your social media campaign. Start confidently and always make

social media a part of your wholesome marketing plan to achieve your desired goals. Once you get

comfortable with these platforms, explore other channels like Instagram, Pinterest etc. too.




27

About the publisher

This report has been co-authored by Travis Hunter & Richard

Santoro, produced and published by Social Media Authority. Learn

more about this study and find the latest updates on the social media

and digital marketing: www.socialmedia-authority.com

Social Media Authority is a new breed of digital marketing agency

that provides a premium, tailored, social media marketing and digital

consulting service.

Our services help clients who have social, online and mobile-first

customers. We’ve helped many CEO’s and marketers to increase their

business’s bottom line, through successful daily management of their

social media accounts. Increase traffic, users and sales.

We take the daily social media tasks off your “to-do” list so you can

focus on the rest of your business.

Find out more about social media authority’s marketing and social

media management services. Email: [email protected]

Visit the website at www.socialmedia-authority.com


http://www.socialmedia-authority.com/

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.socialmedia-authority.com/