While many social media platforms offer paid advertising options, it’s crucial to select the platform that best reaches your target audience. To achieve the best results for your campaign, it’s essential to consider some of the leading platforms in social media advertising.
These platforms include:
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Pinterest
- Instagram
- LinkedIn
- TikTok
At Plura Agency, our strategists and social media specialists can help your business identify the most effective platforms for managing your social media ads. Focusing on the networks most relevant to your company can lead to higher returns and better overall results. Learn more about the key platforms and their advantages below:
Facebook Advertising
Facebook is currently the largest social media advertising platform, with 2.963 billion daily active users as of January 2023. As a leader in social media advertising trends, Facebook is ideal for virtually any business and is often a great starting point for social media advertising. Facebook allows businesses to run campaigns focused on various objectives, such as driving awareness, engagement, traffic, conversions, and even store visits.
In addition to a wide range of ad formats, Facebook offers advanced targeting options, allowing advertisers to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. For example, you can target users based on their shopping habits, travel preferences, and much more.
Facebook offers several ad formats, including:
- Carousel: Showcase up to 10 images or videos within a single ad, directing users to multiple destinations on your website.
- Slideshow: Create video ads using still images.
- Instant Experiences: Build immersive ads using a mix of photos, videos, carousels, product feeds, and more. These ads load quickly within the Facebook app, providing a seamless user experience.
Each format offers unique benefits depending on the goals of your campaign and the content available.
Instagram Advertising
Owned by Facebook, Instagram has a similar advertising system and has seen steady growth since introducing ads in 2015. In fact, the cost per CPM on Instagram has increased by 55% over the past two years.
Visual content is the cornerstone of Instagram ads. Even if you offer the best products or services, poor visuals will significantly hinder your campaign’s success. Instagram ads can be displayed in formats such as photos, videos, carousels, slideshows, and Instant Experiences, just like Facebook.
Instagram also allows advertisers to structure campaigns around goals like website clicks, conversions, app installs, engagements, and video views. Advertisers can leverage the same advanced targeting tools as Facebook, along with Instagram’s own analytics platform.
Twitter Advertising
With over 330 million monthly active users, Twitter offers a variety of paid advertising options to help businesses reach their audience. Advertisers can choose from several campaign objectives, including increasing traffic, engagement, awareness, video views, followers, app installs, or app re-engagements.
Twitter provides targeting options based on location, gender, language, device, and platform, similar to other platforms. However, two features make Twitter unique: keyword targeting and follower lookalike targeting. You can reach users based on the keywords they search for or target users who are similar to those following specific accounts, including your competitors.
Pinterest Advertising
As of September 2022, Pinterest had over 445 million monthly active users. Pinterest allows advertisers to run campaigns focused on objectives like awareness, engagement, traffic, app downloads, and video awareness.
Pinterest targeting includes interest-based and keyword-based options. Interest targeting places Pins in users' home or category feeds based on their past behaviors and topics of interest. Keyword targeting shows Pins in search results based on selected phrases. Combining both interest and keyword targeting is a best practice for reaching a wider audience.
Pinterest also supports custom targeting through engagement lists or email lists, although its demographic targeting is more limited compared to other platforms.
LinkedIn Advertising
LinkedIn offers three main ad types, depending on your campaign goals:
- Sponsored Content: Place content directly in users’ LinkedIn feeds.
- Sponsored InMail: Send messages directly to users' LinkedIn inboxes.
- Text Ads: Display ads around the LinkedIn feed on desktop devices.
LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities stand out when it comes to reaching specific companies and professionals. You can target based on job title, industry, seniority, company size, and more, along with traditional demographics like age and location.
For instance, a heating and cooling company could use LinkedIn ads to recruit top talent or market services to corporate clients.
TikTok Advertising
TikTok is rapidly growing, with millions of active users and eight new users joining every second. It’s an excellent platform for creating engaging, dynamic video ads that align with your brand's personality.
TikTok also provides a variety of targeting options, ensuring your ads reach users most interested in your products or services. From fun, short-form videos to highly targeted campaigns, TikTok offers a unique way to engage with a large, diverse audience.