Paid Social Media: What It Is and Why It Works

Social Media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are pivotal in today’s business world.

Social Media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are pivotal in today’s business world. They offer free and easy ways to communicate with your audience at a moment’s notice. Every business, large or small, has at least one social media page. But the free aspects of these social media platforms can only take you so far. That is where paid social media comes in.

What Is It?

Paid social media is a cost-effective way of ensuring you reach the right audience and that audience is seeing your content. Maybe you have a geographical target, an age range, gender, occupation, or even relationship status that you want to target with your content. Any metric used on these social media platforms to identify its users (age, gender, etc.) can be used by you and your business to create a target audience pool. 

Why It Works

It Targets The Right Audience: There’s nothing worse than investing in a tactic you’re only partially sure will get the right attention. With Paid social media you quite literally get to hand-pick who is seeing your content. And you can get pretty specific too. Say you’re recruiting for interns to join your marketing team. Do you post an ad to all who follow you and hope one of them fits your criteria? Or do you create a posting and set your target to individuals ages 18-22 attending your local college majoring in marketing? We vote for the latter. 

Metrics, Metrics, Metrics: Not only is paid social media smart on the front end, but it’s smart on the backend too. Once you’ve run your social media ad for its allotted time frame, you get to take a deep dive into your ad’s performance. Your pages are super smart and they collect analytics for you to see how well your ad performed. Number of impressions, number of clicks, number of engagements, etc. are all metrics used to gauge how well your ad performed. From here, you can tweak and refine for next time.  

It Improves Brand Recognition and Grows Your Following: By using the refined targeting tools your social media pages have to offer, you’re making sure the right people are seeing you and your brand. Social media ads are a foolproof way to introduce your business to new customers or to remind your former ones about you and your business. And lastly, the ultimate win here is growing your following, thereby adding target audience members to your pages full-time. 

Note: You should never replace your organic social media presence with paid social media only. People want to know there is a person behind the business and the brand, so having organic, real-time posts are important to keep up. Use paid posting strategically and you’ll get the results you need. 

Need more info?

Need more info on the importance of social media advertising? MK Public Relations has you covered. Contact us today at melinda@mkpublicrelations.co or visit our website at www.mkpublicrelations.co.