Building a brand online is a challenge, but social media advertising can bring traffic to your site overnight. No matter what social networks you favor, the purpose of ads is the same: To amplify your content, get more people interested, and drive engagement. By using the right social media ads at the right time, you can accelerate brand recognition and get prospects into your sales funnel. Let’s take a look at the major types of social media ads.
Many people assume Facebook is exclusively a B2C platform, but this isn’t the case. More industry leaders are turning to Facebook to generate lively conversations around their most thought-provoking content. It provides a wide variety of ads for driving traffic or encouraging engagement.
- Domain Ads
These traditional ads are seen on the right-hand sidebar and include a headline, text, and a graphic. Although they are usually inexpensive, they also have the lowest click-through rate of any Facebook ad type. These ads link directly to your domain to increase traffic. - Newsfeed Ads
Newsfeed ads support a much larger image than domain ads and appear directly in the targeted users’ feeds as a sponsored post. These have the added benefit of generating likes for your page, and are most effective when you point them to your most compelling content. - Multi-Product
Multi-product ads are designed to amplify content from e-commerce stores, providing a compelling display of multiple products selected by the advertiser. It supports up to three products, each with their own unique picture, title, and link.
After years of planning, Twitter was relatively late to get into the social advertising game. The different ad types are called Cards, and there are eight kinds to choose from depending on the goal of your advertising campaign.
They include:
- App Card: Drives users to an app store to make a purchase.
- Gallery Card: Shows a hosted gallery of up to four photos.
- Lead Generation Card: Collects email from qualified leads.
- Photo Card: Makes just one image the focus of your tweet.
- Player Card: Provides multimedia playing within your tweet.
- Product Card: Displays a product image and 200-word text.
- Summary Card: Provides a “sneak peek” of any Web page.
- Website Card: Offers horizontal image, text, and call-to-action.
LinkedIn offers two ad types:
- Text and Image
LinkedIn’s ‘Text and Image’ option is a text ad including a headline and a 50×50 image. It is often the cost-effective B2B solution; LinkedIn provides unique capabilities when it comes to targeting B2B decision-makers by industry or job title. - Sponsored Updates
LinkedIn’s other ad option is ‘Sponsored Updates’. These expand the reach of your updates to a targeted audience and potentially raises your follower count. They can increase penetration across all platforms – desktop, tablet, and mobile.
Social media ads can produce enormous ROI. Choosing the right ad is the key to getting the best returns, so always keep your goals and audience in mind as you design your campaign.
At AIMG, we’re social media advertising experts! Contact us today to see how we can help you.