STARTUPS COMPLETE GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING

13 min readDec 9, 2016

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING by Amged Osman

My job as a digital brand strategist, for many people, especially my close friends and family, is a bit of a blur! They never quite really understood what I really do, I mean, after all it’s social media, we post, like share stuff, or that’s what they said. Until recently I started doing some live video streaming on Periscope and Facebook Live, they started to get more interested and probably started to understand a bit what I do and what social media can do for them, beyond just liking stuff.

Who am I writing this for?

For my wife, newbies, my friend’s sister, my friends in general who -as we grow- started to open their own businesses, and now want to include Social Media in their Marketing Strategy. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Definitive Guide to Start on Social Media for Startup, it probably was for them too, and if you’re like them, just starting on Social Media, or starting your startup and want to know more about advertising on Social Media, this article is for you.

Why Am I writing This?

Mostly, for housewives, people looking for a job, or looking to work from home, people looking to make extra money, or even small agencies. My wife and many other ladies, as well as a couple of my friends, have been asking me a lot of questions about advertising, they want to work in that field, even they had noticed that Digital Advertising is important and many companies have openings in that field. So, if you’re in fact looking to start a new career, social media advertising could be a good choice, stick around to learn about the essentials of Social Media Advertising.

What are the objective of brands from Social Media Advertising?

I mean, there must be a purpose of advertising, a goal that brands want, that’s why they show their content and promote it to audiences. Twitter answers that question brilliantly with the “Objective Based Campaigns”. straight forward, you have an objective, and based on it, we help you select a campaign. Once you figure these objectives, everything else is easy to understand.

6 most obvious objectives for Social Media Advertising

Awareness Campaigns to let people know about your brand
Followers Campaigns, to get more people to follow your account on that network
Engagement campaigns, to get likes, shares and interactions with your brand
Video Views, to get people to watch your videos
App Promotion to get app opens or app installs, if you have an app.
Website clicks and conversions, to get signups, purchases or filling forms or even surveys, when ever you want users to leave that social network and be redirected to another website or landing page, that is a conversion.

So, think of your brand and align the above objective with your overall brand strategy before you start any advertising on Social Media.

Social Media Advertising Tips

Always optimize for mobile, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram are all mobile-first platforms, meaning, the majority of their users uses Mobile, so most probably they will be viewing your advert while using Mobile.

For Newbies: Social Media Pricing Modules

CPC: Stands for Cost Per Click, as it says, you pay when someone clicks on your ad, works with Conversions
CPM: Cost Per Thousand Impressions, you pay when your ad receives 1000 impressions
CPI: Cost Per App Install, You pay when a user installs your app after clicking on the install button (Call-to-action button) on your ad
CPV: Cost Per View, works on Video, the cost you pay when someone views your video, currently the cheapest module of them all as most networks are trying to boost their video ads.

Social Media Advertising Terminology Essentials

Targeting: refers to the audience you will be targeting in your campaign
Conversion Tracking: Conversion Tracking enables you to see the return on investment of your Ads by tracking website visitors from your Ad and any associated actions they make on your site/landing page
Pixel: A code or script, that is provided by the Social Network, you place it on your website, and it starts counting conversions that is coming from your Ad. Each Social Network has it’s own pixel, however, you can use Google Tag Manager to manage them all.
Quality Score: is an estimate of the quality of your ads.

Guide to Advertising on Social Media: Facebook Advertising

As we said, Social Media Advertising must have an objective that is aligned with the brand’s marketing objective, that’s why Facebook divided their Facebook Adverts guides into objectives.

Facebook Ad Types

Facebook Adverts Placements — Credit: Facebook

Each objective has an Ad type, to learn about the ad types, you can check the advert guide page for live examples. below are the most common ad types you might use.

How To Start Advertising on Facebook

Objective

Head to Facebook Ad Creation page, and select the objective that matches your marketing plan. Facebook offers 15 objectives (only 10 available for my account though)

Give your campaign a name (Tip: Always make it clear so you can understand it, and keep track of it)

Audiences

Select your Audiences (users you want to show your advert to)

Facebook doesn’t allow keyword targeting, however; it allows of detailed targeting by interest that can goes deep as to your competitions name, make sure to use this feature.

Once you’re done, you can hit save audiences, so you can use them with future campaigns.

Potential Reach

Based on your audiences targeting, Facebook will show a meter of your audiences size, make sure to keep it within the green area

Budget

Can be set either for daily spending (what you will spend per day) or by campaign lifetime (what you want to spend during the whole campaign)

Formats

Facebook can show 5 formats types of your add

Carousel
Single Image
Single Video
Slideshow
Canvas

All add specs can be found here

Targeting Capabilities

Location: Target adverts by country, county/region, postcode or even the area around your business
Demographics: Choose the audiences that should see your adverts by age, gender, interests and even the languages they speak.
Interests: Choose from hundreds of categories such as music, films, sport, games, shopping and so much more to help you find just the right people.
Behaviors: find your audiences based on the things they do — such as shopping behavior, the type of phone they use or if they’re looking to buy a car or house.

Facebook Advertising Course

Facebook has a program called Facebook Blueprint, basically it’s like a school for learning more about Facebook Advertising. You can start your course here or watch the video for more info

Facebook Advertising App

Facebook Ads (iOS — Android)

Facebook Ads App — Credit: Snapshot of Facebook Video

Resources

You can download Facebook Advertising PDF here

Guide to Advertising on Social Media: Twitter Advertising

Things are a bit less complicated with Twitter, at least for new users.

You can start your Twitter Ads campaign in 4 Easy Steps

Objective

The Objective Campaign Manager, basically walks you through the process of creating a campaign that works with your business objective from the campaign.

Head over to twitter Dashboard, and fill in the required information, once done, you will be taken to creating your first campaign.

Setting Up Twitter Campaign

Start by naming your campaign, many brands use that type of naming

“DEC_001_M_KSA_VV” Basically, that naming can get very confusing, but for many brands, it’s good for reporting.

Lets breakdown the name

DEC = December, 001 = Campaign #1, M = targeting Males only, KSA = targeting Saudi Arabia, VV = Video Views Objective

Now, setup the campaign duration, you can run it continuously or define a certain date for the campaign end.

Step 2 — Select your audiences

Location: can be either country or city
Gender
Language: select from 200 available languages they might be speaking
Device:Web, iOS, Android, Blackberry or other mobiles
Platforms: for example, iOS 7 or iOS8
Carriers: The network they are connected from.

Additionally, twitter has a very powerful set of capabilities to fine tune your targeting.

Twitter Targeting Options

Keywords Targeting: To target specific words on twitter
Followers: To target followers of certain accounts, Twitter can target your competitions followers for you
Interests: Select from 25 main categories with +350 sub-categories. Eg: Cars > SUVs
Tailored Audiences: List of emails or handles you already have, you can exclude or include. Read more about setting up Tailored Audiences and using it into your advertising Strategy
TV Targeting: although, it’s not available for all countries, but it allow you to target specific people based on their conversation around certain TV show for example during Airing time of the show.
Behaviour Targeting: not available fo r all countries, but basically it allows you to target people based on actions they make
Tweet Engagers: IMO one of the best targeting options on Twitter, allows you to target users who already engaged with your ads before, for example, once users install your app from a previous campaign you ran, you can push new more ads, and using reengager for them to buy stuff from your website using your app.

Step 3 — Budgets

Daily Budgets: You should set a daily budget to make sure the dashboard doesn’t burn more than you set for a day
Total budget: is optional, however; it’s recommended to add it, just to make sure it doesn’t exceed your budget for that campaign
Bidding: I recommend Maximum Bid, it allows you to take control of how much you want to pay to win a bid and display your ad, however; based on your campaign, you can let twitter decide for you by choosing the automatic bid, which is the most common and easiest way
Pacing: For many cases, you will get a request from your management that you have an urgent campaign that is for limited time, you can then use the Accelerated option to burn as much as possible and as fast as possible.

Guide to Advertising on Social Media: Twitter Advertising Step 3

Step 4 — Choosing your Creative

This step, however obvious, but still often confuses a lot of ad mangers

First thing we need to know is Twitter has 2 types of tweets

1- Normal Tweets Tweets you post normally from your account at twitter.com

2- Promoted Only Tweets: Tweets you post and compose from your advertising Dashboard. Promoted only tweet as hidden tweet, that doesn’t appear on your timeline, but can be used with your campaigns, and you can select them from your dashboard. Promoted only tweets will be marked clearly with Promoted Only Label as shown below.

Finally, once done, hit launch or you can save and exit to launch later.

Ad Preview

With every creative you select, twitter shows an ad preview (as shown on the right side of the above figure)

Ad Types

Promoted Tweets:

Allow you to promote your tweets, cards and apps
Pricing: CPE, CPM, CPAC, CPI based on your objective

Promoted Accounts

To gain more followers
Pricing: CPF (Cost Per Follow) you pay only when someone followers your account from that ad

Promoted Trends

Promotion of your hashtag to country level reach of audiences on a defined day for 24 hours
Pricing: Fixed price per day — different from each country

Twitter Advertising Course — Twitter Flight School

#TwitterFlightSchool is a program designed to make you learn and master twitter products — the program was made available for everyone only this year, however it was started back in 2014

“Twitter Flight School is an easy way to build a deeper understanding of how Twitter works, and how to use it to engage with consumers and be a part of the live conversation.”

Twitter Ads Mobile App (Flightly) — iOS and Android

Resources

You can download Twitter Advertising PDF here

Guide to Advertising on Social Media: Snapchat Advertising

Snapchat offers 4 ways to advertise on their platform/app

Snap ads are video ads that appear between Stories. Users can swipe up to reveal extended content such as longer video, an article, an app install ad, or a website.
Sponsored Geofilters are overlay graphics users can select and add to their Snaped Videos usually used by larger companies
On-demand Geofilters Just like Sponsored Geofilters but for smaller brands)
Sponsored lenses are custom Snapchat lenses.

How To Start Advertising on Snapchat?

Step 1 — Head over to Snapchat Geofilters Page, Login to your account and start creating your Geofilter — you can create new one or upload a design

You can download there template here

Step 2 — Choose a date

New select how many days you want to run this Geofilter

Step 3 — Choose Area

Select the area you want the Geofilter be activated for

Step 4 — Submit

Submit your design, enter your payment details and that should be it.

On another news, Facebook is actually creating a similar feature for their own platform calling it photo frames

Facebook

Guide to Advertising on Social Media: LinkedIn Advertising

To start advertising on LinedIn you need setup advertising account to run the ads,

Head over your advertising account or add new one. You also need to add a Page to your advertising Account o start running your ads

Ad Types

LinkedIn has 3 Ad Types that are available for Self-Serve

Sponsored Content: Use it to reach LinkedIn members right in the LinkedIn feed
Sponsored InMail: Use it to send targeted messages directly to the people who matter most to my business
Text Ads: Use it to drive targeted leads across multiple LinkedIn pages

Creating LinkedIn Campaigns

Step 1 — Social Media Advertising: LinkedIn Ads

Start by typing in the name of the campaigns, campaign names character limit is 50

Step 2 —

Select a content you have already shared, or simply create new content

Add your text, upload an image or paste a link

Hit Save and continue to next step

Step 3 — Targeting on LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows of a very detailed targeting options

Country / Location
Company Name
Company Industry
Company Size
Job Title
Job Function
Job Seniority
Member schools
Fields of study
Degrees
Member skills
Member groups
Member gender
Member age
Years of experience

You can read more on How Social Media Targeting can help Startups Secure a deal. I’ve explained more in details how can you utilize LinkedIn Advertising.