Social media is based on two main pillars: regularly inserted, valuable content and paid advertising. It allows you to reach a wider audience and specifically to a selected target group. This makes advertising in social media very effective, but it needs to be well designed. Here also counts good quality content and above all knowledge of your product and the target group to which it is addressed.

Social media ... what else should you know

Social media connect brands and fans, allowing them to enter into dialogue and build relationships. This is the main value of social media. However, to be able to talk about it, someone has to see the shared materials. So it's all about reach, and this reach can be generated in various ways. One of them are trends. On various social media sites trends appear from time to time - for example, the type of video or post that is trendy at a given time. It can be some kind of challenge, challenge or answers to questions. By deciding to create such material, you can reach a wide audience, based on something that is trendy and eagerly searched for.

Similarly, Real Time Marketing is also applicable here, i.e. using the current situation, events for marketing communication. On Facebook, it is very easy to insert an additional post referring to something that has just happened, which will spread virally through the network.

The development of social media has not only made new channels of marketing communication appear. Along with social media, a new profession has emerged, namely influencers - people who create an impact on their audience and have a large following. Influencers advertise products by mentioning them in their materials, which allows companies to reach a huge audience of potential customers. Influencers are active on various channels and cover a wide variety of topics, from video games and beauty care to electronics or automotive. If you want to learn more about social media and its role in marketing, check out the online training on the Webinar Universe platform. Reviews indicate that the materials on this site are interesting.

Account, fan page, fans, reachSocial media efforts

should begin with choosing the right communication channel. There are so many social networks that every industry will find a place for it. Still the most popular is Facebook, through which it is possible to reach many target groups - there are both younger and older users with very diverse interests. Facebook allows you to publish multimedia materials, graphics and video accompanied by text. This makes it an ideal place for factual posts.

Instagram, on the other hand, relies on photos - it is the graphics or video that can be seen immediately, and the text is somehow an addition. Here, however, the most interesting is the ability to add stories, or materials that disappear after 24 hours. This is a way to communicate more loosely with the recipient and to give him quick information: about current promotions or new products. It is also a great place to present the company's "backstage", i.e. to show how work looks like in a given place. This positively influences the image, showing the recipient that behind their favourite product there are ordinary people whose work they can observe.

Increasingly, TikTok is also used for marketing activities. It's the most specific social media that won't suit every brand - although that's slowly starting to change too. On TikTok, famous for its short videos accompanied by music, there are many accounts with interesting facts, factual knowledge about a topic. You can use this trend to reach younger audiences, as TikTok users are mainly teenagers and young adults.

There are two ways to increase the reach of social media: organically, by posting regularly, moderating the community, responding to messages and comments, and posting on other profiles. And also paid, that is through advertising. Each social network has its own advertising system, which allows you to reach many new recipients. Effective advertising in social media is a catchy text, eye-catching graphics or video and well-chosen target group. If you want to learn more about social media advertising, discover courses on the training platform. Online learning is a great way to expand your knowledge.

Effective clicks

Social media advertising has many advantages:

• large reach - more and more people are using social media, so you can reach a huge number of potential customers through it,
• low costs - compared to other forms of online advertising, advertising in social media is cheaper and costs are flexible,
• building brand image - it is easy to present your offer and inform about promotions,
• engaging users - in social media you can build relationships with customers and have direct contact with them,
• precise targeting - it is possible to determine many characteristics of users who are to be reached by the advertisement; it is also possible to target the advertisement to users similar to those who are already customers or have a specific set of characteristics.

It is best to start planning your campaign with an analysis, taking into account:

• the budget for the advertisement,
• expected results - whether it is about the flow of new fans of the profile, increasing traffic or improving recognition, or perhaps promotion of an event,
• at what stage of development the company is,
• who is the target group, who is the recipient, what is their interest and which channel is the easiest to reach them on.

Further actions depend on the chosen medium. The most powerful tool for creating ads is Facebook. The system here allows you to create a very specific target group, specifying many characteristics of the recipient, to which the ad is to go. You can prepare a post with a photo/gif/video - it is worth taking care of catchy content. On Instagram, it will be similar, but here everything is based on the photo, because it is the most exposed.

Reporting and development

The first paid campaign is not always a success. To determine what went well and what didn't quite, it helps to analyze the results. You need to check how many recipients you reached and how many new fans/buyers you actually got - of course it all depends on your goal. If something went wrong, it's worth taking another look at your target audience. The most common mistake is inappropriate tarteging, i.e. too wide or too narrow a target group. This can increase advertising costs or cause you to reach people who are not interested in your product. Another mistake is inconsistency of the ad with the communication on the profile, uninteresting photo/video or too much text. To improve the effectiveness of ads, it is worth testing - it is best to run test campaigns for low rates, for example with two different creatives and another with different target groups. This will allow you to check which settings are the best in a given case.

Social media communication is one of the most effective ways to build brand image and customer relationships. To be successful, it is not enough to publish free content and collect organic reach, because it is difficult to reach new audiences this way. This is where social media advertising comes in handy. It should be well matched to the target group and consistent with the content published on the profile.