AI is changing the way marketers create social media content. Learn how this impacts your brand’s social media effort, for better or for worse.
Meaningful social media goals give your business the direction it needs to succeed. Learn how to create quality goals to guide your marketing efforts.
As two social media powerhouses, both Facebook and LinkedIn offer tremendous advertising potential for businesses. However, not all social media platforms are created equal. Facebook and LinkedIn each have their distinct advantages and disadvantages depending on what you're trying to do and who you're trying to reach.
To help determine whether Facebook or LinkedIn is the right paid social advertising avenue for your organization’s specific campaign, you'll want to start by understanding the unique features of both platforms.
With more than 2 billion users worldwide and 50 million businesses using a Facebook Business Page, Facebook has defined itself as a leader in the social media realm. Their success has ultimately evolved through their expansive advertising network, which, despite recent criticisms and controversy, is estimated to generate $21.57 billion in U.S. ad revenues in 2018 alone. In fact, Facebook ad revenue in the U.S. is expected to exceed total print ad spending by 2019.
Facebook’s ownership of Instagram also presents further opportunities for marketers using Facebook as a paid advertising tool to expand their network reach through another platform.
It's important to understand that when you advertise through Facebook’s platform, the ads you create can be promoted through both Facebook, Messanger, and Instagram simultaneously (or separately), and even displayed on other websites through Facebook's ad network. You'll only need to build your ads once through Facebook’s advertising tool, which minimizes your marketing efforts for multiple platforms into one. This offers you additional audience reach through your dedicated campaign budget.
When building Facebook ads, you have a few options:
Facebook’s audiences can be segmented by distinct details such as:
You can segment audiences a step further by building custom audiences from current customer lists or by re-targeting people who recently viewed content on your website.
Facebook charges advertisers at a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per mille – cost an advertiser pays for one thousand clicks or views from an ad). The CPC or CPM of promoted ads depends on several factors: demographics, size of your target audience, or the social network itself.
Facebook’s advertising network tends to be less expensive for marketers than other social advertising platforms. The average CPC and CPM of Facebook ads is $0.27 and $4.03.
To evaluate the results of your campaign, these are the key metrics to understand within Facebook’s ad platform:
Well-known as the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn’s advertising platform is another key asset to marketers. With more than 450 million users, LinkedIn’s growing advertising platform has made its mark alongside Facebook as another significant tool to get in front of businesses or consumers.
While Facebook is more of a social platform, LinkedIn positions itself as a network for businesses, engaging users on a less “social” level and serving as an outlet for recruitment, expertise, and connections in a professional environment. Marketers can utilize LinkedIn’s ad network to directly target key decision makers within an organization, along with reaching influencers and opinion leaders whose reach could make an impact on their brand.
Like Facebook, LinkedIn offers a number of ways to build your ads through their Advertising Campaign Manager tool:
LinkedIn advertising campaigns allow you to target very specific professional details, such as:
LinkedIn follows similar cost structures to Facebook, charging marketers at a rate for CPC and CPM. The average CPC within LinkedIn tends to be higher than Facebook – around $6.50 per click.
LinkedIn also requires marketers to place a bid against other marketers for ad placement on the network. LinkedIn will make bid amount recommendations for you based on estimates of competing bids for the same target audience, but you are able to specify the maximum amount you are willing to pay for each click.
When evaluating the success of your campaign, here are a few of the key LinkedIn data metrics you’ll want to understand:
Now that we've broken down Facebook and LinkedIn’s advertising platforms, there are a few questions you’ll finally want to consider for your campaign:
1. What type of content are you promoting?
The content itself plays a vital role in deciding which social platform is right for your paid campaign. Consider an audience's intent on either Facebook or LinkedIn's platform and how your content might resonate with them from there.
For example, professionals using LinkedIn to connect with influencers in their industry may be more receptive to a promoted post with relevant educational information for their career than a promoted post for clothing items to purchase. It's important to understand what role Facebook and LinkedIn both serve as social media platforms and think of how your content fits the expectations of the users on that platform.
2. Which audience are you trying to reach?
Your audience is going to play a big role in the success of your campaign. Just as it's critical to have knowledge of Facebook and LinkedIn's platforms, it's also important to understand which audiences use these networks and which audience you specifically want to reach through your campaign.
Consider whether you're focused on reaching businesses or consumers, specific locations or demographics, etc. The more details you can gather about your target audience, the easier it will be to compare whether or Facebook or LinkedIn, or both, can accommodate your audience specifications.
3. What are your goals and metrics of success for this campaign?
After you've determined which content you'll promote and the audience you'd like to reach, it's essential to create campaign goals and metrics that will ultimately determine whether or not the campaign was successful. Are you focused on creating awareness around your brand? Are you interested in driving traffic to your website or generating "X" number of leads? Determining what results you'd like to see prior to launching a campaign will help you make adjustments throughout the campaign and serve as examples for campaigns in the future.
4. What is your campaign budget?
Your overall campaign budget could have an impact on whether you advertise on LinkedIn or Facebook. Throughout your evaluation, consider how your goals could align with costs. For instance, if your campaign is solely focused on driving as much traffic as possible to a blog article and your budget is limited, it may make sense to promote your content on Facebook where the average cost per click tends to be lower.
Regardless of which social network you choose for your paid social advertising campaign, there's no right or wrong answer for your choice. Experimenting with your content strategy, audiences, and budgets over time will give you insight into what works best for your organization and build successful future campaigns.
Need help? Aztek can help you create and maintain social media marketing campaigns that make sense for your business. Contact our team today to learn more.
