Social Media Advertising: Can you do without it?

This is blog #3 in the series ‘Demystifying digital marketing’

In the two previous blogs in the series, we saw why it’s crucial to first build your digital presence and optimise your digital strategy.

Before you start developing your social media advertising strategy, it’s important to understand exactly what social media ads are. Stating simply, a social media ad is any kind of paid content on a social media network. On facebook, it’s the sponsored stories that appear in your newsfeed. (See example)

Your logical question next is bound to be “Why do I need paid ads on facebook”? The answer is simple. Facebook is not here to promote your business. And people who think so are simply naïve.

To simplify this, think of your personal profile on Facebook. Let’s say you have 1000 friends, you are part of some groups and you follow some celebrities, businesses & brands. Facebook needs to show you 40-50 items on your newsfeed beyond which you would not scroll anyway. So how does Facebook decide what to show in your newsfeed?

Facebook scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked. In most cases, that’s more than 1,500 posts. It simply cannot show all of these. It has to filter some top posts. This is where the Facebook algorithm comes into play. (And this algorithm is closely guarded and constantly keeps changing). Facebook’s news feed algorithm ranks these 1500 posts, in what it believes is relevant to you. It needs to also inject paid ads into your newsfeed.

While the attempt is to simplify, the above paragraph may still seem technical. If so, don’t fret. It is not needed for you to dive deep into technical stuff on the working of the Facebook algorithm; leave that to us. It should suffice to know that Facebook does not show people all content available. So how does your content reach people should be part of the digital strategy.

It’s time you come to terms with the reality that Social media is no longer unpaid media. Many small & mid-sized businesses need a shift in mindset. Consider social media just like traditional advertising e.g. paper inserts, outdoor publicity, television, radio, email marketing etc. You may wonder how social media advertising compares to the traditional ways. It’s often also perceived as more expensive. That’s not so. In fact, it’s the cheapest medium, provides a very good ROI and helps you with focussed targeting better than traditional ways.

So, if you are not already doing so, its time you allocate a chunk of your advertising budget to advertising on social networks. Use social media to advertise and transform your business. So how do you do it? Call us for a free consultancy!

Next in the series “Analyse to turn social data into action”.