5 Reasons Businesses Should Spend Money on Social Media

Your business consistently shares valuable industry-specific content, engaging photos, and has a powerful brand voice on social media, but the results are still not meeting your business goals. How can you leverage social media as a tool and gain more traction?

Social media is continually evolving, and with it, your social strategy should be doing the same. Here are the top five reasons why businesses, large and small, should spend money on social media.

1. Algorithm updates have changed the game
One thing we can assure the user: Even if your organic content is engaging, it’s not reaching your full audience. Social media platforms have changed the game with algorithm updates in order to sort and prioritize a flooded market of content for better user experiences.

The goal of the algorithms is to deliver the content that appeals most to you. These algorithms use thousands of metrics to learn what you like based on your behavior, but often this can cause many businesses and brands on social media to get lost in the shuffle.

Social posts that used to go viral now need a little help in reaching audiences. It’s now impossible for a business to organically reach every single person connected to its page through organic means. Social media is increasingly becoming a “pay to play” platform.

2. Campaign objectives that drive business goals
How do you make sure your voice is heard on an algorithm-controlled platform? Brands must learn to leverage social media as an advertising platform. No matter what your business goals are, social media advertising allows you to easily execute ad strategies by selecting campaign objectives that align with your desired outcomes and results.

Do you want to increase engagement with a piece of quality content? Are you looking to collect email leads or drive a direct sale? You’re in luck.

Based on your campaign objective, you’re only charged when the action you specify is completed, such as a click to visit your website, or when you gain a follower.

3. Highly reliable first-party data for precise targeting 
Social media platforms have struck gold with first-party data. While their primary mission is to allow people to share and express what matters to them and connect with others, the data they compile from users presents a valuable marketing opportunity. These social giants are able to sell this data to advertisers.

Social media sites track on-site activity, such as page likes, ad clicks, profile information, check-ins, and device and location settings. Facebook is also alerted every time a user loads a page with a “Like” or “share” button and when users scroll through a website using a Facebook Pixel.

While users may feel like Big Brother is watching, advertisers should rejoice! This first-party data is reliable and allows for precise targeting based on location, age, gender, language, interests, and behavior. This data can be used to create targeted campaigns that can turn social media users into loyal customers.

4. Even more precision with third-party data
On top of their own data, social media platforms offer marketers the option to target ads with data compiled by third-party firms. These sources provide their targeting from government and public records, consumer contests, warranties and surveys, and private commercial sources such as loyalty card purchase histories or subscription lists.

All of this data can be used to create highly targeted personas in ad campaigns to drive results for your business. Social media platforms should no longer be looked at as only content machines, but as comprehensive advertising platforms. These platforms are just a little bit more social (pun intended).

5. Cost-effective marketing
If you’re still looking at social media as a platform that falls short in tracking results and ROI, you may need to rethink how far social advertising has come in the last few years.

While ad pricing varies based on the platform used and other factors, including the time of the year, the location you’re targeting, and the quality of your ad, social media advertising as a whole has proven itself to be a cost-effective marketing tool.

For example, link clicks and conversions on Facebook averaged 27.29 cents in the United States in Q3 in 2016, in a report by Hootsuite. The average CPC for an Instagram in Q3 in 2016 was $0.72.

Analytics on most social media platforms have transformed and offer advertisers a wealth of data to analyze how ad campaigns are performing. Social media analytics can even provide data on how users are interacting with landing pages and websites even after they leave Facebook through tracking tools such as the Facebook Pixel.

Are you ready to find out how your business can leverage social media advertising? Contact us and we can schedule a time to talk about your business needs and goals.