Time for One: Which Social Platform is Best for Me?

Garrett Heath is a social media and content marketing consultant and founder of MarketingBytes.io.

Between the pitches and proposals, paid placements and performance decks, today's digital marketer's cup overfloweth, often leaving little time to properly research new platforms or ad spends. These days, though, with marketing departments devoting almost 12% of their budgets to social media , making the right choice is key. So, how to choose? The following guide breaks it down.

First, the Ground Rules: We're TalkingPaid Social Marketing Efforts

This article is primarily concerned with social marketingefforts backed by a budget—those advertisements that show up as “sponsoredcontent” or “promoted posts” on social networks. The reason for this is quiteclear: many organic social media efforts (i.e., simply posting updates to yoursocial feed without advertising dollars to boost them) are going largelyunnoticed.

This discovery dates back to a white paper by MarshallManson from the renowned agency Ogilvy called “FacebookZero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach.” In this landmarkreport, Manson shows that the organic reach on page posts plummeted on Facebookfrom 2012 to 2014, dropping from 12% of fans seeing a post to just 6%. Withthat in mind, let's take a deep dive into some of the more popular socialnetworks and strategies for employing paid advertisement on each of them.

LinkedIn: The Professional B2B Audience

If you're into B2B marketing and can only choose one networkto spend money on, LinkedIn is your best bet. This is the professional network and users self-report importantdemographic information, such as title, profession and company. Marketers canrapidly create a campaign targeting professionals with particular traits thatalign with their product or service—very little is left to the imagination whentargeting personas on LinkedIn.

Furthermore, the LinkedIn advertising platform has beenevolving. A push for users to adopt hashtagsin their status posts in early 2019 enabled LinkedIn to offer a new array ofinterest targeting for advertisers—now you have the ability to target notonly on members' profiles, but also on the things that are relevant to them.Furthermore, at the end of Q1 2019, LinkedIn distilled all that interesttargeting and rolledout audience templates, so social marketerscan quickly and easily identify a cohort of users, such as “marketing professionals.”At the same time, so-called lookalike audiences help match users who aresimilar to a company's current customers.

But the biggest tool in the LinkedIn arsenal for deliveringmessages to high-quality targets is sponsoredInMail campaigns. These personalized messages show up in a user's LinkedInmailbox and are delivered only when the person is online, helping boost theodds that the collateral is actually seen.

As you can imagine, LinkedIn has a high cost-per-click (CPC)rate, especially as you zero in on specific audiences, but that expense istempered by the quality of the audience. This is why LinkedIn is such a sweetspot for B2B marketers with premium products or services: they're more likelyto have the fortitude to handle such high advertising costs.

Facebook: 2+ Billion People Can't Be Wrong—B2B on aBudget and B2C for Older Demographics

But what if you're a B2B marketer on a budget and don't havethe luxury to pay out the high CPC rates of LinkedIn? I'd advise you not toturn your nose up at Facebook. Upon suggesting Facebook as a viable channel forB2B messaging, I always receive the following from marketers: “Is a high-levelexec even on Facebook consistently? And if they are, are they even interestedin looking at my enterprise-grade software or service?”

In short, yes on both counts.

With almost 2.5billion monthly active users (MAU), seasoned professionals who are not on Facebook are few and far between.Yes, that high-profile executive is there for the memes and baby photos likethe rest of us. And similar to LinkedIn, it has a ton of demographicinformation—including employment data such as company and title—that'savailable for targeting. Given that Facebook is more personal than professional,the data may not be as refined as that on LinkedIn, but it's available at abetter CPC.

And while your target consumers may not be actively shoppingfor your particular product or service in the moment, B2B marketers have theopportunity to start the conversation by piquing interest and tradinghigh-quality gated pieces of content for consumer information (emailaddress/contact info) that can be nurtured at a later time. Both the breadth ofthe social network and the targeting capabilities make Facebook a solid optionfor cost-conscious B2B marketers.

Similarly, paid social media advertising can yield resultsfor B2C marketers whose target audience is older millennials and above, as thisis the platform of choice for those age groups (PewResearch Center, 2019). Facebook advertisements are particularly geared fore-commerce companies—they can upload their product catalog, retarget previousvisitors and even have a pretty seamless “in-Facebook” checkout.

A word of caution on two fronts: First, in my personal B2Cecommerce business, I haveseen my Facebook return on advertising spend (ROAS) decrease by almost a thirdyear-over-year. This is a direct consequence of a trend that CMO Survey hasreported on—as more traditional dollars get moved to paid social media (andconsequently the leader of the pack, Facebook), the bidding for ads is gettingmore competitive. 

Second, in the wake of data breaches and scandals, Facebookis removing many of its targeting capabilities. In the summer of 2019, thesocial network giant said that it wouldremove thousands of interest targets in the coming year—many of them havebeen valuable to me, including particular employers and festivals.

Instagram: A Younger, Visual-Driven B2CAudience

Technically part of the Facebook advertising stack,Instagram is nonetheless its own advertising beast and marketers shouldapproach it as such. This channel is ideal for B2C marketers looking to make a visualimpression on a younger audience. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) or lifestylebrands that rely on visuals to sell their products are going to reap far morerewards than an enterprise software-as-a-service offering. This is for a fewkey reasons.

First off, while older individuals gravitate towardFacebook, younger consumers are on Instagram (PewResearch Center, 2019). Simply look at the data, and you'll see a startlingage gap—there's no reason to spend money advertising a product geared toward anolder or executive audience in this space.

Instagram is also photocentric and how those visuals lookmatters to consumers. Brands shouldn't just “lift-and-shift” their ads intoInstagram.

In the peer-reviewed Computersin Human Behavior journal article “‘Snaphappy' Brands: Increasing Publicity Effectiveness Through a Snapshot AestheticWhen Marketing a Brand on Instagram,” authors Jonas Colliander and BenMarder reported that photos with “snapshot aesthetics” perform best on theplatform. The team defines this look as photos that are not polished, likeprofessional pictures, but rather images that “portray average situations andappear as if though [sic] they could have been taken by the average consumer.”

Finally, the ephemeral Instagram stories—posts that remainup for 24 hours and then disappear—are changing consumer engagement on theplatform. Users are now rapid-fire clicking and swiping through stories and arebecoming more accustomed to full-screen, portrait-style updates. 

Social Media Today reportedin January 2019 that over 500 million people were using Instagram stories daily,leading to this insight for brands: “As more people become increasingly attunedto the layout and style of Stories, their expectations for content is changing.And with Facebook maintaining a steady flow of Stories updates, it is becomingthe primary sharing and engagement option for many.”

Snapchat and TikTok: Connecting with GenZ

Snapchat and TikTok may not be the platforms of choice formany of today's social media marketers—particularly those in B2B—but it's worthnoting that these are the places to connect with Gen Z.

Once thought to be in ashes after Instagram rolled out itsstories feature, Snapchat has since stopped trying to get older people on itsplatform and hasinstead turned its eye back on Gen Z, becoming one of the hottest tech stocksof 2019. And the explosive growth of TikTok alongwith its forthcoming ad platform will give advertisers a direct pipeline tothe youngest consumers.

While most reading this piece will not have a use for eitherplatform when it comes to advertising, one thing remains clear: the socialmedia marketing space is always evolving and you need to stay in the know.

Be sure to stay tunedto the TrueLoyal blog for more of thelatest trends. And if you're curious on how your marketing department canleverage user generated content in your campaigns, be sure to checkout some of our on-demand webinars!