Social Advertising: What are the options?
By Corrie Oberdin • 11 March, 2014
11
Mar
Social Advertising: What are the options?
In Social Media, Uncategorized by Corrie Oberdin 
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In a recent article, AdAge cited a recent study by Social@Ogilvy, stating that organic Facebook reach is crashing and burning for brand pages. For those of us who track social metrics, this isn’t a surprise – we’ve been seeing it coming for the last year.
In the article, Adadge discussed that paid posts or social advertising are one of the ways that many brands are compensating for limited view numbers on Facebook. When we speak with clients, we’ve learned that many marketers just don’t know what options are available to them. Today, we’re going to look at the advertising options that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn offer. Note that we took all of these ads from the accounts that manage the Iridian Group account, so you can see some of the targeting that goes into these ads – a number of them are marketing oriented.
Facebook offers three main types of ads – promoted posts, sidebar ads and newsfeed ads.
Promoted posts are when a page pays money to promote a status update to fans or specific targets. You can tell a sponsored post because it says “Sponsored” in the bottom right hand corner:
Sidebar and Newsfeed ads are actually two different views of the same type of ad. While one looks like a status update, and the other a traditional ad, they are actually controlled from and created the same way – one lives on the right hand side of Facebook, while the other appears in the newsfeed. For each of these, Facebook actually offers a number of different options, depending on what a brand is trying to accomplish (have people like a page, visit a website, install an app, etc):
Twitter offers three types of ads – promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted hashtags, though promoted hashtags currently have very limited availability. Promoted tweets show up in your newsfeed and can be from either accounts you follow or accounts that you don’t follow. They are designated by a yellow arrow with the word “promoted by” under the message:
Promoted accounts show up in a number of different places – on Twitter’s web client, they show up on the left hand side, under “Who to Follow” or in the “Who to follow” section. On the mobile app, they appear on the “Discover” section:
LinkedIn offers a variety of display ads, but one of their newest offerings is the sponsored post, which allows company page owners to sponsor updates made to the page. Targeting can be to page followers, or to other targeted groups including positions, employees of select companies, geography and more.
There are many different ways you can use each of these options, and from a test and learn scenario, social ad tests can be very affordable. Sponsored posts and accounts may help make the difference between being heard and being left behind.
