{"id":8925,"date":"2011-06-15T05:07:08","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T10:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/37d57f8fa2.nxcli.io\/blog\/?p=8925"},"modified":"2011-06-15T05:07:08","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T10:07:08","slug":"social-media-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/web-marketing\/social-media\/social-media-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Social Media Isn’t Really Free Marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of us equate social media with \u2018free\u2019 communications. It’s a surefire way to reach your audience without spending a dime.<\/p>\n

But you may want to consider some of the other opportunities that social networks can offer. Because social networks have tremendous information about their… \"\"communities, they can offer you paid advertising opportunities which are highly targeted.<\/p>\n

Are you interested in doing advertising on one of the social networks? Not sure which one to use? Use the info below to go over the pros and cons of advertising on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.<\/p>\n

Facebook Ads
\nFacebook advertising is by far the most developed of the three social networks: Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. A Facebook ad functions, in a way, like Google Adwords but not at a Google price points, so it’s pretty affordable to even the smallest of businesses.<\/p>\n

The best part of Facebook ads are the targeting opportunities. You can be extremely specific about who you want to target from gender to age to likes (golf fanatics, gardeners, skiers, cooks, etc) as well as even target down to a specific city. To me, this is the great benefit of the Facebook platform.<\/p>\n

Facebook is a great social media marketing<\/a> platform for targeting end consumers by their geographical location, demographics and psychographics. It is less strong in the B2B market, though.<\/p>\n

You can target your Facebook at to to an external webpage but you can also have a campaign to attract \u201clikes\u2019 to your Facebook Fan page. This can help you build up a social community on Facebook that you can profit from in the long term.<\/p>\n

LinkedIn Ads
\nLinkedIn is an excellent professional social community, so it’s not surprising that Linkedin Advertising is a great place to advertise to other businesses. Once again, you can be very targeted in your advertising effort and advertise to people in certain size companies with certain titles. Linkedin Ads are still quite low so it is a very efficient way to get your message across.<\/p>\n

Never forget that the real power of Linkedin is the Linkedin groups. So make sure that you include them in your targeting for your ad campaign.<\/p>\n

LinkedIn\u2019s popularity is growing in leaps and bounds and it is inevitable that the price of its ads will go up. So if you want to participate, you should consider doing that sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n

Twitter Ads
\nFor the moment, Twitter\u2019s ad platform is the least developed of the three social media marketing platforms. Twitter only offers advertising to large brands in the form of \u201cSponsored Tweets\u201d.<\/p>\n

An advertiser will pay per impression to have a tweet show up at the top of a feed when certain search terms or hash tags are being used.
\nAs it stand then, Twitter ads\u2014particularly for individuals or small businesses- does not have a whole lot to offer yet.<\/p>\n

Whichever social media marketing platform you use, make sure to do your research. If you’re paying for a service, you might as well get the most out of it. Ask around to see what others have to say and make an educated decision based on others opinions and your needs, and you’re sure to come up with the advertising solution that’s best for you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of us equate social media with \u2018free\u2019 communications. It’s a surefire way to reach your audience without spending a dime. But you may want to consider some of the other opportunities that social networks can offer. Because social networks have tremendous information about their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[224],"tags":[394],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8925"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marketingforsuccess.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}