Social Ads (Advertising on social networks) – What are Social Ads?

Social Ads  are the advertising spaces that social networks make available to advertisers in order to reach users segmented by demographics or interests.
When a publication is made on social networks, it is shown to a percentage of the followers or contacts in a natural way, based on the different algorithms in charge of distributing the content among users. Social Ads allow you to increase reach in a paid way to reach users who cannot be reached organically but who are part of an advertiser’s target audience.

  

Índice

  1. Social Ads advertising networks and ad types
  2. Features of Social Ads
  3. Advantages of using advertising on social networks

Social Ads advertising networks and ad types

The different social networks have online advertising platforms available to advertisers. These are some of the main ones:

Facebook Ads

It is Facebook’s advertising network (which has also included Instagram’s for some time now) and allows you to advertise on what is the social network with the most users today. The ad formats it allows are the following:

  • Video:  Video format ads

  • Image:  Advertisement consisting of an image

  • Collection:  Items and products from a catalog

  • Sequence:  Combination of various images or videos in the same ad (up to 10)

  • Presentation:  Dynamic presentation of various static images

  • Canvas:  Full Screen Instant Load Ads

The objectives of the ads can be:

  • Lead Generation

  • Show offers

  • Post interaction

  • Responses to events

  • Get page likes

Instagram Ads

Like Facebook, Instagram offers various ad formats to reach the audience of this social network.

  • Video

  • Image

  • Collection

  • Sequence

  • Ads in stories 

Twitter Ads

The social network Twitter allows you to create ads with a format similar to the publications that its users can make:

  • Conversational Ads:  Tweets with text or video that are promoted to appear on target audience timelines.

Linkedin Ads

LinkedIn’s platform for advertising is called Content Manager and allows the following formats:

  • Sponsored content

  • “InMail” sponsored content:  Sponsored content in the internal messaging network of the social network

  • Text ads

YouTube Ads

The video content social network owned by Google offers the following ad formats, which are managed from its Google Ads platform: 

  • Display ads:  300×250 or 300×60 banners that appear to the right of the video or above the list of suggested videos

  • Overlay Ads:  Image ads that appear overlaid at the bottom of the video

  • Video ads (skippable and non-skippable):  Video ads prior to the video to be played

  • Bumper Ads:  6-second ads that must be viewed in full in order to play the video

  • Sponsored Cards:  Clickable cards that appear at certain moments in the video

Snapchat Ads

The Snapchat social network also allows various ad formats:

  • Ads

  • Filters

  • Lenses

Features of Social Ads

Social media ads offer the following features:

  • Great effectiveness:  The large amount of information that social networks accumulate from their users makes it a very effective advertising due to its ability to segment by demographics, interests and behavior, in addition to the fact that the ads allow user interaction.

  • Based on interests and behavior:  Advertisers have the ability to segment the audience of their ads by age, sex, place of origin, interests and behaviors they have within the social network.

  • Adapted to the formats allowed on the social network:  Advertisements on social networks are integrated into users’ feeds, pretending to be normal publications, so the integration within the organic content is total.

Advantages of using advertising on social networks

Advertising on social networks is widely used because it offers various advantages that make it a very interesting product in digital marketing: 

  • Great segmentation capacity:  Social networks have a large amount of personal data about their users, as well as their behavior and affinities. This allows an enormous possibility of segmentation, being able to show ads to the most similar users, increasing CTR, interactions and return on investment.   

  • Payment for results:  Social Ads can be integrated into Performance Marketing campaigns, that is, oriented towards specific results such as generating leads, conversions, purchases, subscriptions, followers, etc. They can also be used as a branding strategy, that is, aimed at increasing brand recognition and not at specific immediate results. The payment method may vary depending on the objectives, the most common being CPC.     

  • Detailed analytics:  Social media ads offer a large number of real-time metrics that allow you to understand and optimize campaigns very effectively.