What is Social Media Advertising? Importance of Social Media Advertising and Best Platforms
Before diving into social media advertising, let’s uncover some facts about it to have a clear understanding of the market.
There were 5.52 billion internet users in 2024, which is almost the 67.5% of the global population. Among those, 5.22 billion were social media users which is 63.8%.
In 2024, approximately 256 million new users joined social media marking a 5.2% contribution towards growth.
The latest research on social media shows that 94.5% of global internet users use social media each month. People spend about 15% of their awake lives on social media for reading content, making connections, and communicating with like-minded people.
Like the other types of digital marketing, social media advertising also plays a vital role in contributing towards the end results of brand image and revenue.
Now, let’s discuss social media advertising.
What is Social Media Advertising?
Unlike social media marketing we discussed in the previous article, in social media advertising, we pay advertising platforms to reach our targeted audience.
Social media advertising is a process that enable businesses and individuals to run paid advertising on different social media platforms. This process involves paying platforms for promoting different types of content to reach potential audiences.
You cannot only reach the targeted audience but you make them visit your website and convert them to leads and sales.
The biggest benefit of social media advertising is you can reach a much larger audience than the followers you currently have. These platforms give full control of your audience demographic to place your ad in front of high potential audience.
Social media advertising platforms know everything about their users. That’s why there is no need to worry about wasting your hard-earned money.
They know about their demographics like age, gender, location, language, behavior, interest and personal details.
Importance of social media advertising for businesses
Now that, you have a clear understanding of social media advertising, you might be wondering why it is important.
Social media advertising has quickly become an important practice for brands looking to achieve their goals, increase sales, boost revenue, and build a strong brand image.
There’s no doubt that the world is changing rapidly and businesses must need to adapt new ways of marketing to stay on top of the trends. Businesses need to adapt new marketing ways to sell, build awareness, and generate stable revenue.
Among these, social media advertising is the most popular marketing way to reach the target audience and meet goals. Traditional marketing doesn’t work well in this digital world.
Businesses that are still dependent on traditional marketing are losing too much potential for sales and revenue. By using modern digital marketing techniques, any business can double up its revenue in a very short time.
That’s why it is important for businesses to adopt social media advertising and marketing as their primary source of selling goods, providing services, and establishing brand image.
There are many reasons for utilizing social media advertising and marketing, but here are some benefits:
Benefits of social media advertising for businesses
Investing in social media marketing and advertising can be super easy for you if you have a clear strategy for your business goals. By reading these social media advertising benefits, you will have a clear understanding of the importance of social media marketing.
- Increase brand awareness
Social media is the best platform for establishing a strong brand presence. Posting and promoting content on social media advertising platforms is a highly effective way to develop strong brand awareness.
Reach interested audiences more easily with social media. Showcase the positive impact of your businesses on people’s lives. Establish a strong awareness about the benefits of your businesses and services.
Businesses that are new to the market, must establish a strong brand awareness to stay for a long time in the market. Nowadays, people are brand-conscious. They buy products and use the services of businesses that they can trust.
Brand awareness is something that can make or break your trust among the audience. Establish a strong brand presence by using different social media marketing platforms.
- Improve engagement
Engagement is the measure of how people interact with your business after seeing it. If you provide quality they like it and if your business is not beneficial for them, they simply ignore it.
It’s a great way to measure your business success on social media. Organic reach on many social media marketing platforms has been dropped. That’s why businesses must need to focus on promoting content through social media advertising.
On social media channels, people go to engage with like-minded people, brands and businesses. Through social media advertising, you can lead these engagements to loyal leads and sales.
Interact with interested audiences on different social media marketing and advertising platforms to make them feel your brand.
- Target your specific audience
After establishing a strong brand awareness, the next step is providing values. By targeting people interested in your business, you’re establishing your brand values. You provide products and services that add value to people’s lives.
Your audience feels a connection with your businesses after seeing them multiple times on different platforms. When you provide values, there’s a chance to build a strong loyalty base for your business.
Social media advertising enables you to target your business-specific audience more wisely. Each platform has data of their users. You can target them based on their activities such as likes, shares, comments, purchase history, behavior and many more.
- Generate more leads and sales
Social media advertising is a great way to increase your sales and leads. Each social media platform allows you to connect your landing page with the content you’re promoting.
This landing page contains either a lead form or a sales CTA. People make purchases on the websites. Social media advertising pushes people to visit your website and make purchases of products and services.
Design user-friendly landing pages and optimize them for a better user experience. Advertisers send traffic to your landing page. It’s your landing page that pushes people to make purchases.
- Promote Offers
Through social media advertising, you can promote offers to your loyal customers. Whether it’s a blessed Friday or a Summer sale, give your customers value by providing them some great offers.
People mostly wait for special offers and sales. They like to purchase their favorite items on sale. Facebook and Instagram provide great features for promoting offers and sales.
Best Social Media Advertising Platforms
As like the social media marketing platforms, there are some social media advertising platforms every marketer and business should know about. Here’s a breakdown of each social media advertising platform along with the necessary details for effective advertising.
Facebook offers great options for advertising products and services. The unique thing about Facebook is that it is very affordable and it has the largest audience network compared to other social media channels.
When advertising on Facebook, you’ll first need to select your campaign objective. Facebook offers 6 type of promotions.
- Awareness
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Leads
- App Promotion
- Sales
Choosing the right ad objective is necessary to make your campaign successful and get a good return on investment (ROI).
After choosing the right objective for your campaign, you can move on to audience targeting which is another important factor in Social Media Advertising.
Facebook Audience Types
Facebook offers three types of audience targeting options.
Saved Audience – Create an audience based on demographics, location, language, age and behavior.
Custom Audience – Target users who interact either with your Facebook page or website.
Lookalike Audience – Target audience like those who are in your saved or custom audience.
Facebook Ads Types
There are five Facebook ad types. Choosing the right ad format according to your campaign specification is essential and important. Facebook social media advertising offers the following ad types:
Single Images – A single image with a link to your website or landing page.
Carousel Ads – A combination of multiple images in a scrolling format. You can add a link to your website separately with each image.
Video Ad – Promote video content along with your website link. It performs better in the awareness stage (Based on my experience).
Collection ads – Showcase multiple products along with one main product.
Instant Experience Ads – Focused on improving the user experience, users can experience a better view of the product by zooming in and out in the instant ads.
Some facts about Facebook
As of December 2024, Facebook has over 3.05 billion active users which makes it the world’s largest social media channel.
37% of the world’s population uses Facebook at least once a month.
Men between the ages of 25 to 34 make up the largest audience on Facebook accounting for 17.6% of global users.
Instagram advertising is very familiar with Facebook advertising. Meta offers to manage ads for both Facebook and Instagram in one place in Meta Ads Manager.
Similar to Facebook, Instagram also offers to target based on location, behavior, language, and age. It also lets you create different types of audiences including but not limited to behavior base, custom, and lookalike.
Social media advertising through Instagram lets you choose among the following objectives for your ad:
- Awareness
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Lead
- App Install
- Sales
The unique thing about Instagram advertising is that it allows you to place your ads in explore and on stories. Explore is the place where people come through organic searches.
Instagram Ad Types
Instagram supports five types of ad formats. Choose the right format for your social media advertising campaign to be successful. Here’s a breakdown:
Stories Ads – Images and videos can be used along with a link to the landing page to promote through Instagram stories. People will be directed to your landing page after clicking through it.
Photo ads – Photo ads help to drive special types of objectives including likes, shares, and comments. It can also be used for generating leads and sales.
Video Ads – Video ads are very helpful for awareness campaigns. You can run advertising on a 60-second video through Instagram.
Carousels Ads – Carousels are a combination of images. Each image contains a link. The purpose is to drive leads and sales through a landing page.
Collection Ads – Collection ads contain one large primary image along with other small secondary images.
Instagram Facts
Oberlo indicates that Instagram ads revenue reached $70.9 as of 2024.
A recent report shows that there are above 2 billion active users on Instagram. It means that like Facebook, Instagram also has a great potential for brands to shine.
Research indicates that on average, a U.S. adult spends 33 minutes each day on Instagram.
As of January 2024, there were more men (50.6%) users of Instagram than women (49.4%). All other social media marketing and advertising apps are popular among younger audiences between the ages of 18 to 34.
TikTok Advertising
TikTok is a new and rapidly growing social media advertising platform. It has become the powerhouse of advertising in a very short time, especially for businesses targeting younger audiences between the ages of 15 to 25.
It has an advertising audience of 88 million. The largest age group of TikTok advertising is between 12 to 24.
TikTok Ads Types
There are four options for advertising on TikTok for advertisers. Selecting the right format according to your campaign is necessary. Here’s a breakdown:
Image Ads – Contains an image along with a link to the landing page.
Video Ads – The most popular ad format of TikTok is video ad. It contains a landing page link along with some video content.
Spark Ads – Spark ads are similar to boosting posts on Facebook and Instagram. They look like organic posts and the purpose is to drive more comments, likes, shares, and saves.
Collection Ads – These ads are similar to instant experience ads. It contains a collection of products and pages so that users can stick and have everything on one page.
TikTok Advertising Facts
US TikTok ads revenue is about to hit $10.42 billion in 2024, which is 38% more than in 2023. It is estimated to hit $15.26 in 2026.
Video ads on TikTok have a 15% higher engagement rate compared to static ads.
1 in 4 users of TikTok take action after seeing the ads, either by making the purchase or acquiring the services.
The majority of TikTok users are male (54.8%) and the largest group of TikTok users are male between the age of 25 to 34 years.
YouTube
YouTube is the largest and oldest social media advertising platform with an audience of 2.56 Billion.
Since YouTube is owned by Google, that’s why YouTube shares the same features as Google Advertising, but there is one major difference and that is YouTube promotes video ads.
YouTube displays ads before, in the video, or after the video you’re watching. These ads can be shown on the other partner platforms of YouTube and in apps also.
YouTube Ads Types
YouTube offers 6 formats of advertising for advertisers. Social media advertising experts utilize all these types to align best with their campaign requirements. Here’s a breakdown of all ad formats:
Skippable in-stream ads – These ads play before, during, or after other videos on YouTube, websites, and apps that are Google videos partners. After 5 seconds, you have your choice either to skip the ad or continue watching.
Non-skippable ads – These are non-skippable short ads that play before, during, or after another video. In these types of YouTube ads, viewers have no choice to skip the ad. These ads support videos of 6 to 15 seconds.
Bumper Ads – These are short, non-skippable ads that play before the video. The support videos of up to 6 seconds must be watched before the new video.
Out-stream Ads – These are mobile-specific ads that appear within non-video-based editorial content. Out-stream ads are also called native ads.
Masthead Ads – Masthead ads appear in the home feed of YouTube. You can showcase your business, products, or services in a video ad format.
Overlay Ads – Overlay ads only appear on the desktop at the bottom of the video. These ads play after the video starts on the desktop only.
Conclusion
Social media advertising is the cornerstone of modern business success, offering unparalleled precision in audience targeting, exceptional brand visibility, and tangible results.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube empower brands to captivate millions, transform interactions into conversions, and amplify their market presence.
In today’s competitive digital era, embracing social media advertising isn’t just strategic, it’s transformative, paving the way for boundless growth and lasting impact.
