Coming up with new content ideas is not the biggest challenge social media marketers face. It’s actually generating organic traffic. In fact, 43% of social media marketers voted the decline of organic post reach and engagement rates as the most pressing concern in social media marketing.
If you’ve been in the social media marketing game for quite some time, you may have noticed that organic reach and engagement have dwindled over the last five years. Brands and creators relying on social media are struggling to be more creative by jumping on the latest trends to expand the maximum potential of their organic reach.
1. Social media companies are changing their direction
More than 4.2 billion people worldwide or approximately 53% of the world’s population are connected to social media. This means that social media platforms have established themselves as a promising source of audiences for marketers. So it comes as no surprise that more social media platforms have taken the ‘pay-to-play’ route in recent years.
- In 2013, Facebook introduced its ads system. Around the same time, Facebook users reported experiencing a decline in the reach of their organic posts.
- In 2014, shortly after Facebook’s move, Twitter introduced their advertising platform and dashboard. This enabled users to see that their tweets’ organic posts only reached 10 – 30% of their audience.
- In 2015, Instagram launched its advertising platform as well.
The power of organic posts does not cease to exist. Some reports revealed that the top 1% of Facebook pages are still organically reaching more than 80% of their audience.
However, if you’re part of the 99% of social media users who struggle in organic post-performance, it may be time to face the hard reality that you may have to start setting aside budget to boost your posts to reach more of your target audience. While spending more seems like an added expense, it is not all bad news. Accessing the paid side of social media also comes with several benefits.
2. Get meaningful insights on your customers and how your posts perform
Each social media advertising platform comes with an analytics dashboard that presents various data. These dashboards can give you a helicopter view of how your account is performing. Now, if you are boosting specific social media posts, you can also access the same performance metrics such as likes, shares, and impressions. These metrics for each post will help you zoom in on specific aspects of your postlike the timing, headlines, CTA, and other elements. This way, you can also conduct A/B tests to assess what works best for your social media posts. These tests will optimize your social media activities and results in the long run.
Insights from social media analytics also provide you with a real picture of how your advertisements resonate with your target audience. Forget doing surveys or projections about your ad performance. The metrics from the social media analytics are enough to provide an understanding of your advertisements and how your target audiences perceive them. Social media analytics can also be a starting point for you to analyze the issues or any particular aspects of your brand that the target audience cares about. Are they liking your ads, commenting, or clicking through?
3. Your brand will be able to reach a targeted set of audiences
Social media advertising platforms are equipped with features that allow audience targeting based on specific demographic criteria. You are in control over who will see your advertisements. In general, you can target specific locations and age groups. However, specific social media platforms have enhanced features that can go deeper into their audience targeting.
- Facebook enables targeting based on users’ behavior, interests, or connections to particular pages or accounts.
- LinkedIn is known for connecting business professionals. It has targeting options based on specific professional skills, industries, or even job titles.
So if your brand has already developed a persona and target demographic in advance, you can craft a tailored message for a dedicated audience group, combined with the audience targeting options that social media platforms have to offer.
4. People spend more time on their phone
Everyone owns at least one phone or maybe even more. Sleeknote mentions that mobile users are expected to make up almost 73% of total eCommerce sales in 2021. Meanwhile, data from StatCounter show that mobile is leading in the worldwide market share.
But what’s interesting is that people are spending more and more time on their mobile devices. Just in the USA alone, 46% of users are spending 5-6 hours per day. That’s 35-42 hours per week from a single person!
Now that people are more present on social media, you just have to choose the right platforms for your audience between Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok—or all of them.
5. Tighten the gap of your customer journey
Let’s say your brand already has a complete understanding of your customer journey. And you notice that you can still tighten the gap of your customer journey, or maybe make it easier for your customers to convert and shorten their journey. Maximizing the use of social media advertising can definitely help you do exactly that. Nowadays, social media is equipped with objective-based advertising that enables your business to create a more focused campaign.
If your business is struggling to drive more conversions, you may allot more budget for lead generation campaigns. On the other hand, up-and-coming companies building awareness can focus on driving traffic to their social media pages or their website.
Final thoughts on social media advertising
Despite budget concerns, marketers actually enjoy a friendly Cost-Per-Click (CPC) rate in social media advertising. Facebook, for example, has an average CPC of $0.39 in 2020. Considering that advertising is one of the most important lifebloods for social media platforms, it is safe to assume that the pay-to-play concept in social media is here to stay.
If you are looking for help in developing your brand’s social media presence through paid social media advertising, you’re in the right place. Feel free to reach out to one of our experts here in Kaliber.
Our experience in managing LinkedIn and Facebook ads placements might be just the expertise you need to advance your social media marketing goals.
