We all know how great social media advertising can be for business purposes but you cannot simply buy ads on any network that you find. While social media is obviously a great part of modern marketing strategy, you have to only dive in after you understand advantages and disadvantages of every single network. Obviously, you will consider the following social media networks:
As you surely already know, Facebook is huge, with over 1.2 users that are registered. You can have a huge visibility here and the number of advertising options is great. There is no limitation to how much you can spend. If you want to, an ad can be of just one dollar per day. Viewers can be chosen based on so many different factors, which is always great. However, the problem is that metrics used to analyze results are not that great.
A big advantage is that the audience is mainly made out of businessmen. The ads are seen by people that are business-minded. Because of this, the conversion rates are quite high. In a similar way to Facebook, targeting can be done based on numerous factors like location, employee title and demographics.
The problem with this social media network is that click through rate is really low. Users behind clicks are qualified but you can easily expect to get around 1 click for 500 impressions instead of 1 click in 200 impressions on Facebook.
You can easily target people on Twitter based on interests. For instance, if a person uses a specific hashtag when tweeting, that person can be targeted through your ad, just as with Google AdWords. At the same time, if you want to, you can target based on industry followers, showing your ads just to the followers of that person.
The problem is that it is hard to target based on interests. You do not have many interests that you are able to choose from. Choosing just one category can easily become ineffective, especially if the industry is really large.
Google +
Those that use the social network are usually more tech driven than those that use Facebook. You need to analyze the audience so that you can realize if it is the best one for you or not. The Ads on Google + are really large in the sense that you can easily reach a large advertising audience.
Advertisers only pay for clicks but you may need to know that hovering over one of the ads for 2 seconds does count as a click. Also, the number of users is quite low, just around 540 million, a lot lower than the other networks on the list. Targeting options are not great and promotion policies stand out as really restrictive.