9 Ways to target on social you may not know about

February 24, 2016

As the minefields of social advertising get ever more complex and essentially a very far cry from simple tweet or post boosting we must move toward to putting audience first, defining your objectives and monitoring closely to optimising your targeting as you go. All very good practice, yes, but what other, more diverse opportunities does social hold in respect of targeted or paid / promoted activities. We thought we’d round up a few recent highlights that you may or may not have discovered recently.

1. 1. You can collect leads directly within FacebookYes, you can collect leads on Facebook. Yes, you can build lead gen forms on Facebook. Yes, it may very well be a welcome alternative to LinkedIn and even better; the emails are collected to a downloadable excel document straight to your Facebook brand page which you can download directly! Boom.
   2. You don’t need an Instagram profile to advertise on Instagram (you do need a Facebook page though).Since Instagram advertising became a feature within Facebook ads platform, there’s been certain discrepancies over whether or not to use an Instagram profile to reach Instagram audiences. This doesn’t have to be the case. For those social advertisers savvy enough to be a dab hand at power editor, the option to use Instagram as an extra display option is available without the requirement of an actual Instagram profile – advertisers can simply use the Facebook page as a representative profile. Be warned, customising your content for Instagram placement is highly advised in order to avoid brand-barrassment (Hah!).
   3. You can promote other people’s tweets as a quote.Since Twitter quoting was streamlined and radically distinguished from its similar counterpart – the retweet – it has been clear that quoting was a way of referring to others tweets while at the same time publishing an original post. This being the case, profiles can happily promote quotes to their target audiences. This might be very useful for showcasing customer feedback and amplifying brand advocacy.
   4. You can re-target to people who engage with a tweet.Still in the roll out phase, this a simple but very purist approach to in-channel retargeting and definitely an advantage over Facebook’s retargeting options. The simple option to serve secondary messaging (more tweets) to anyone who has engaged with your primary messaging (your first tweet). That’s it! Simple right?
   5. There’s a new way to promote on Facebook called: Brand Awareness.The new Facebook Ad objective states that you can ‘Reach people who are more likely to pay attention to your adverts and increase awareness for your brand.’ It’s as simple as that and as the feature may suggest; the objective relies almost 100% on Facebook’s ad-serving algorithm to put your ads in front of only the people that will spend more time looking at them. Presumably as a result of a combination of browsing habits, behaviours, related interests and timings. This kind of objective could be great for newly launched brands, products or services. Especially those built around sentiment driven messaging.
   6. You can promote a Periscope Livestream Tweet.We recently challenged Twitter Ads UK on automated tweet promotion (sounds dangerous, yes) regarding the opportunity of when a Periscope stream goes live and the announcing tweet is shared, could this tweet be automatically promoted and contrarily be turned off once the stream has concluded. Makes sense right? This option is currently not available as an automation but Periscopers can still manually promote their live-streams with the flick of a switch, even from the ads section of Twitter mobile. A useful strategy for extra reach on-the-go and / or during live events.
   7. It only costs $450,000 to advertise on Snapchat (spare pocket money anyone?)Until recently, Snapchat’s sponsored content was limited to the few who could afford the rumoured $700k price tag. Even during Super Bowl Gatorade’s sponsored lens of their famous Superbowl dunk was rumoured to cost close to a cool mill. Snapchat, however as ore recently, rolled out the ability for users to create their own custom geo filters for personal profiles and brands alike. However the actual cost of this is pretty much unclear but no doubt expensive to those who can afford it and a lot less to those who can’t.
   8. Facebook Video views can get as low as £0.001 Cost per viewAs with many other Facebook ad campaigns, if you get your initial targeting to a respectable relevance score, coupled with a large potential reach, you can expect to receive high volumes of video impressions. In turn, if you get a reasonable level of positive engagement with your videos, it will actively drive down the cost per video view. We have seen costs as low as 0.001 per 2-second view. Be aware that this may depend on the length (and value) of your video and the size of your target audience.
   9. You can target page followers by their interests for FREE!Organic Facebook page targeting has, until recently, been something only involving simple demographics. I.e. choosing between gender, location age etc. But even though this is significantly more advanced than the nearest competitor. Offering no organic targeting at all, Facebook have still raised the bar by adding free ‘preferred interest’ targeting. The ability to put your posts in front of page followers who’s interests match the post content first. You can also use the ‘audience restrictions’ to exclude audiences who presumably may not like the content you are posting.