Numbers and statistics previously mentioned in the section “Management of social media pages and accounts” clearly show that we have become digital societies, spending daily increasing time in front of computers and mobile phone screens on social media. Indeed, the numbers indicate that there are 200 billion visits monthly only on Facebook in a world having 7 billion people!!!
As a normal result, companies and brands turned to these websites as an e-marketing way attempting to reach new customers, communicate with existing customers, restore and activate previous customers. Subsequently, after the increased demand for such websites, their companies were prompted to amend their policies to enhance their services provided to its users to attract more users, and to adjust their posting policies to motivate companies to advertise for higher profitability:
A few years ago, Facebook used to display 100% of any page posts on the wall (reach) of all followers of this page but this percentage decreased gradually until it became 2-4% only to force companies and entities wanting to reach customers to make social media ads.
Benefits of social media advertising:
The Pay Per Click (PPC) method is the most popular in most social media ads. It allows you to pay only for the customer viewed your ad or fulfilled a requirement, such as filling out a form, booking an offer, or liking a page.
Social media platforms are various and each one is distinguished in some countries or areas. Twitter is more widespread in the Gulf than Egypt, but it has not yet permitted ads targeting our Arab region. On the contrary, Facebook is more widespread in Egypt and is strongly marked by its ads, which increase daily in our Arab region. In the meantime, LinkedIn was characterized by the highest price per click, but it is the strongest and most successful in social media advertising addressing the business and investment sector (Business-to-Business).
Social media ds of the majority of such websites shared diversity of their targets as for watching an ad or video, filling out a form, booking an offer, liking a page, downloading a mobile phone application, calling for an event, etc. They are also distinguished with accurate selection of the target ads as for gender, age, country, city, neighborhood, interests, and even type and brand of the device used to access the Internet. Besides, they are characterized with the most important feature; i.e., following the ad in real time, which enables you to modify, stop, or play it to attain the ad goal.
The general marketing rule says: “Marketing is an investment, not an expense.” Therefore, maximizing the return on investment (ROI) requires firm follow-up of the ad, clear understanding of the ad goal, and measuring its success. The next common mistakes should be avoided:
- Targeting the increase of the number of your page likes is an illusion pursued to gain fame and prestige but it does not achieve any financial benefit. Actually, some pages prompted by this illusion tried to buy some legal or illegal likes; consequently, Facebook stated in its latest amendments announced weeks ago that it would review the page likes to cancel such non-interactive likes. This process has already begun, and the likes of many pages are decreasing daily. To realize that it is a huge mistake, you should know that Facebook stated in its statistics that 96% of the likes of the pages of companies and brands do not revisit such pages, so it would be better to interest in your page followers who represent your target customer segments, to communicate continuously with them in a good, constant and attractive way;
- Measuring the ad success by the number of views considering that this is the only way to measure the ad failure or success because achieving the highest click-through rate (CTR)/number of views means your success to attain your goal;
- Creating social media ads without constant follow-up and modification, or making them in one format or image, neglecting the wonderful advantages given by some of such websites to permit you to present your ad in several formats with the same budget and target. This advantage enables you to measure the most attractive and influential format to be used and to cancel the other formats of the ad.
It is a mistake to imagine that social media ads are just a design and a target as advertising is much more than that!!!