As digital marketers, you certainly have your eye on how social media advertising can help your business. But for all they offer, many people stop after considering Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In that way, you might be missing out — there’s more to social media campaigns than those three.
In fact, there’s three others that bring a lot of value to the table: LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok. But why’s that, and how do you take advantage of it?
Let’s start off with LinkedIn, home of the business nerds. Depending on the type of product or service you’re promoting, LinkedIn advertising can be really valuable. That’s especially the case for B2B businesses — since you’re selling to other businesses, why not go to the platform with all the business people on it?
The first step is creating a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account and then choosing your official objective. You’ll have three options here: awareness, consideration, or conversions. (This is a similar feature to Facebook ad campaigns that helps guide you through the best settings to achieve your campaign goals. We wrote more about Facebook campaigns here if you want to check it out.)
Example Of Where To Create LinkedIn Ad
After that, you’ll design a picture for who your target audience is. You can base this off factors like job titles, their industry or a specific company, or you can bring in your own custom Matched Audiences if you’re planning on remarketing.
Then comes your ad format. Do you want single image ads, carousel image ads, message or text ads, video ads, or dynamic ads? Take your pick.
And, of course, there’s your bids and budget. As far as type of bid, you have a few different automated and manual options — generally speaking, we recommend automated bidding. Then for the budget itself, you can choose your maximum CPC or CPM.
The rest of the process then hinges on setting up the creative aspects of your ad; this is where you’ll apply the copy and imaging that audiences see. After that you’ll save your billing information and you’re good to go!
Like we always stress, this isn’t a set it and forget it process; you’ll still want to remain engaged with the campaign as it continues and adapt to make sure you’re getting the best results possible.
If LinkedIn is where you advertise to business nerds, then does that make Reddit the platform for advertising to standard nerds? We kid (mostly) — Reddit’s a great platform to reach an array of people.
Reddit’s also perfect for doing organic advertising, although that’s a separate monster that we could write a whole other piece about. For now, we’ll focus on paid campaigns.
Much of the setup process is similar to LinkedIn, starting with setting up your advertising account. From there you want to determine your audience, which includes deciding which subreddits you’ll be advertising in. The fantastic thing about Reddit is that there’s about a gazillion different subreddits, all focusing on a different topic that attracts different people. These range from topics as broad as “soccer” to as specific as “squirrels eating unconventional things.”
This variety means each sub is a group of self-selecting people with many of the same interests, qualities, and to an extent demographics that you’ll be targeting.
Example Of Reddit Ads
The one thing to know about choosing the subreddits you’ll target is that subreddits vary by size — the college football subreddit has 997,000 people, the “Ask Reddit” subreddit has 28 million people, the “Cats on Glass” subreddit has 91,000, but the subreddit for garden decking is only 86 people. In order to advertise in a sub, it has to reach a certain pageview minimum of 6,600 views in three months.
After deciding which subreddits you’re focusing on, you’ll actually set up your campaign. Just like with LinkedIn, you’ll be directed to choose an objective and from there will specify the audience you want to target. Along with the subreddits you’re targeting, this includes potential audiences’ location, what kind of device they’re on, and the time and days your ads will run.
In this process you’ll also determine your budget and bidding settings, which function the same as with LinkedIn and other platforms.
Just like with all online marketing, a successful campaign comes from consistently monitoring and evolving your campaign to make sure it’s getting the best results possible.
TikTok
Lastly is TikTok. TikTok skews younger (and subsequently less nerd-ish).
Just like with the other platforms, you’ll have to decide your budget and bidding settings. One of the primary decisions to make regarding budget is whether you want to be using a daily or lifetime budget. As the name implies, daily budget is how much to spend per day, while lifetime budget is how much you want to spend during the course of the ad campaign. Or, if we want to personify the campaign, its “lifetime,” if you will.
Example Of TikTok For Business
When determining bid settings, you’ll want to look at your target CPA and strategize around your goals there.
While we always stress the importance of keeping watch on your campaign’s performances and optimizing from there, you don’t want to go crazy fiddling with the bid settings; TikTok discourages changing things up more often than once every three days at most, or changing bids by more than 20% at once. This is because making changes more often or on a greater scale than those doesn’t give their system time or magnitude for the “learning phase” to be completed.
With that in mind, you can choose “optimize conversions at learning phase” to help with your initial bid strategy.
As for the creative side of your TikTok ads, they have useful tools embedded in the platform to help. It’s recommended to update your creative factors — whether visual or copy — every week. Part of that can be adding new creatives to existing ad groups.
While Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram occupy more space in much of our collective consciousness, these three platforms offer the ability to target more specific user bases. With their advantages, you have the potential to create efficient campaigns that not only provide exposure to the right audiences but endear you to them.
