by Erik M. Dell

Created on: October 31, 2010

Marketing your business on social networking sites is not only easy but surprisingly rewarding because sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter rely on advertising revenue to earn money.  This guarantees the user interfaces to set-up the advertising campaigns on these social media sites is painless and easy to use.  While each site will be slightly different, it is possible to use one campaign over multiple sites.

The most important step to running your advertising campaign for social media sites is planning.  This will allow you to advertise your business to a target market you select.  Five questions you need to ask yourself when you sit down to do your planning for advertising on social media sites are:

1)      What are my keywords? – Keywords are very important as they will link your ads to the target markets.  For example if you were to advertise a fantasy football site as a sports site you would likely spend too much money because sports is a much larger demographic than simply fantasy football.  Try and narrow down your business idea with key words.

2)      What am I selling? – A very obvious question that can sometimes get lost in your ad.  Social media users don’t spend a lot of time looking at ads so you need to grab their attention within the first couple of seconds they glimpse your ad.  Don’t try and sell them the product in the ad because your goal is to get them curious enough about your product to click the ad which will then transfer them to your website.  This is where you want to sell your product not the ad.

3)      What is my picture? – A picture truly is worth a thousand words.  As mentioned earlier, people on social media sites don’t spend a lot of time on one page and it is important to catch their attention with either keywords are a great picture.  Most sites will resize your picture for you but make sure the picture is interesting so the user is tempted to click the ad to find out more about your product.

4)      Price out your advertising campaign – Social media sites will often require you to name a set amount of money you want to spend on that particular ad per day/week/month.  Knowing how much you want to spend will make this step less painful.  To run a successful social media ad campaign you should have a total budget that is broken down into separate sites (multiple sites are suggested) and then further  broken down into ads per site.  It is generally a good idea to have multiple ads on one site to ensure maximum saturation of your target market.  If one ad doesn’t work on a particular user then maybe the next ad will.

5)      Monitor your metrics – Sites such as Facebook and Google will offer tons of metrics on how your ad is doing over a period of time.  Make sure you check your campaign at least daily, this will allow you to make changes if a particular ad is not doing well.  Also if a certain ad seems effective then maybe you copy it to another site since you had success on another site.  This is a critical step because social media is always changing and you need to monitor the status of your advertising campaign for effectiveness.

Running an advertising campaign on a social media website is similar to advertising on other platforms.  With a little bit of planning you can effectively market your business to a target market as narrow as 10 people to as wide as over a million people.  The potential to drive traffic to your website is enormous and easy to attain.

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