If the news is that important, it will find me

Social media advertising for corporate communicators

My post originally appeared on the Hanover Communications website.

In early November, two interesting pieces of news came from Twitter. The San Francisco company could make a profit if only if wasn’t so concerned about holding onto its star employees. And here in the UK, it is raising the price of its premier Promoted Trends product by 50%.

Is the latter driven by its need to make greater revenues? Yes but that’s not the main reason for the increase. Twitter is seeing strong demand for what in effect is to become a brand takeover for a day in a particular country. The Promoted Trend tweets are now set to appear right in users’ timelines as opposed to in the left-hand panel on twitter.com and in the Discover tab on mobile. Twitter predicts advertisers’ Promoted Trends will be 122% more visible to users in the UK each day, hitting an estimated two million tweet impressions.

With only 365 slots a year, will competition among consumer brands be rife? Twitter’s product trials in the US suggest so. And what about communicators in corporate roles? From my experience, there is little understanding of social media advertising and where it might fit in a media relations or public affairs campaign.

Where it is used effectively, it need not be overly expensive and it can have some fantastic results. Why? It’s because social media ads are a highly targeted product. They are the epitome of the new digital age. As New York Times journalist Brian Stelter wrote in 2008, a student told him: ‘If the news is that important, it will find me.’ Social media ad platforms place big data-driven campaigns right at your fingertips. Here are three examples of social ad targeting:

• Placing a video in front of the 208,000 Twitter users who are female, in the UK, interested in science
• Suggesting to 54,000 Facebook users who live in a 50-mile radius around Chelmsford in Essex, who speak English as a first language and and Like either the Labour Party or UKIP, that they sign a change.org petition on social mobility
• Sponsoring a LinkedIn Influencer article about a new university course in the politics of the Middle East, targeted to the 1,379 LinkedIn users in the UK who work in education and speak a Middle Eastern language

How do you find out more? Twitter ad campaigns are straightforward but agencies can use buying power to get cheaper deals for clients. There are also paid media options with Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and more. We see it as our business to have relationships at the social networks to help clients make sense of this fast-changing landscape.

Beyond your main objective of earning an improved reputation or achieving a change in legislation, social media ad campaigns can provide a measurable waypoint and bring focused scale to your activities.

Photo Credit: Clearly Ambiguous via Compfight cc