العربية 
Social media ads are a branch of digital marketing where paid advertising campaigns are run on social media platforms to reach the target audience.
Marketers and advertisers can promote their brands and inspire sales through the social channels that users use frequently. Consider the following social media ads stats:
26% of users who click on Facebook ads end up purchasing the advertised product
More than 7 million companies use Facebook to advertise
It is estimated that brands will nearly double their social media advertising budget by 2023.
These compelling stats provide a clear picture of how integrated social media ads have become for enterprises to grow their businesses. As you scroll through the Facebook news feed of all of its platforms, you may have come across a post with a label saying “Sponsored.”
This is advertising on social media at work.
In the online world, drawing attention to your message is getting more and more complex, as user attention is increasingly becoming a scarce resource. Advertising on social media is hugely influential because it allows you to get your message across to your ideal buyers throughout the buying journey. For example, before a new product is released, a brand can run a brand awareness campaign to gain a pre-hype. Likewise, a B2B organization can re-engage its audience through remarketing campaigns to sell an expensive product.
Social media ads distinguish themselves from traditional ads with complex targeting capabilities, as traditional advertising relies on a carpet-bombing approach, that is, brands deliver ads to the maximum number of people possible, regardless of whether they are interested or not. On the contrary, social media enables brands to connect with ideal buyers based on their geographical, demographic, psychological and behavioral characteristics.
Key components of social media advertising:
A successful social media advertising effort consists of the following five components:
Campaign overview:
The campaign overview sheds light on the elements of social advertising campaigns
Campaign Diagram:
The campaign planner provides initial details for the ad campaign. It contains the campaign name, ideas / inspiration, details (such as purpose and objectives, how you will help achieve your company goals, etc.), hashtags, and any such information.
Objectives:
What are you trying to accomplish with the campaign? Here are some ideas:
Brand awareness
Increase your social media following
Increase sales of the tenth product
Drive website traffic
Visits to the online store
Define your goals as they will allow you to benchmark against the right criteria and calculate the campaign ROI.
the target audience:
Be as specific as possible when it comes to choosing the right target audience. Look in the analytics section of your social media accounts / pages to understand your audience and what type of content they accept most often. Visit your buyer persona templates to define the most relevant characteristics and traits.
Finally, you can create test campaigns on different platforms to see what kind of audience you can reach based on the filters applied to determine the target audience. Most platforms give you an approximate number of people that you can reach with an ad campaign. Adjust the properties accordingly, so that your targeting is neither too appropriate nor too broad.
Campaign designs:
Campaign designs are copy ads, messages and visuals (photos, gifs, and videos). Campaign designs should be prepared with the guidance of the target audience and platform in mind. For example, hypertext visuals do not perform well on Facebook. The same audience visits different platforms with a different mindset. Therefore, it is advised that you customize creatives for each platform. You can run A / B tests by tweaking the version and visuals to improve performance.
Social media platforms:
The most used platforms for social media ads include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. Different social networks serve different audiences. For example, Pinterest may not be the best choice for businesses or FMCG brands that may not be driving a successful awareness campaign on LinkedIn.
Choosing the right social media platforms will help you determine the budget, ad format / formats, and customize campaign messages for the individual platforms.
Campaign budget and metrics for success:
It helps to divide the campaign budget into brackets to effectively track your ROI:
Fees / Charges: If you work with a social media advertising agency, you need to keep their fees separate from the actual budget. However, you will include payments made to third parties such as a copywriter, graphic designer or video editor, and the money you spend to buy stock photos, videos, or software.
Ad budget: This includes money that you will actually pay for the platform to run the ad campaign.
Setting an ad budget can be a little daunting, especially if you are a beginner, so here’s how you can set the budget for showing ads; Let’s say you need to generate 20 leads with a lead generation campaign. Through your research, you discover that a single lead on Facebook costs $ 10. So, the campaign’s initial budget will be $ 200. Given the fluctuations in the pricing process, you can increase the sales budget.
Best Social Media Advertising Platforms:
In this section, we’ll take a look at the main social media platforms you can use to run ad campaigns, along with some examples to inspire you.
FB:
Facebook offers comprehensive advertising options for brands that enable them to display ads across the awareness, thinking, and conversion stages in the buyer’s journey, as each stage offers multiple ad types to reach the goal;
Awareness: brand awareness, reach
Think about buying: Traffic, Sharing, App Installations, Video Views, Lead Generation, Messages
Conversions: Conversions, Sales and Store Visits
Facebook audience targeting allows you to target users based on criteria like age, geography, income groups, interests, work / profession, etc. Brands can diversify their audience base with custom and likeable audiences.
Facebook currently supports the following ad formats:
Video: Brands can promote video ads of up to 240 minutes in length. However, the best performing video ads tend to be short.
Images: Brands can boost engagement through image ads.
Engagement posts: These ads help you increase brand awareness, as your posts are boosted to get more likes, comments and shares.
Page Likes: You can run image and video ads to increase likes for your page and build your online community.
Group: Group ads display a primary image / video along with four images arranged in a grid below the primary media. After clicking on the ad, the user is taken to the product page. Post-click sequence is triggered by an instant experience, thus, the user can view the landing page without leaving Facebook or Instagram.
Carousel shelf: allows brands to feature up to 10 photos or videos within one ad, with each photo / video consisting of a different link.
Slideshow: With Facebook Ad Manager, brands can create a slideshow video from a collection of photos. Facebook allows brands to add animation, text, and audio to these videos.
Instant Experience: Formerly known as Canvas, these are instant interactive ads, which are mobile-exclusive ads that can contain up to 20 photos or videos up to two minutes in length.
Lead generation: Prospective ads allow brands to collect information from users who are interested in their offerings. These ads are available on Facebook and Instagram and can host image, video and carousel formats.
Deals: Businesses can offer discounts to their customers by using image, video, group, and carousel ads.
Event responses: Brands can increase awareness and respond to event invitations with image and video ads.
Instagram:
Instagram offers ads similar to Facebook, and you can manage ads for both platforms through the same interface – Facebook Ad Manager.
You can target people on Instagram based on their location, demographics, interests, and behavioral characteristics. Instagram also lets you create custom and likeable audiences to find new users who share similar characteristics as your ideal subscribers.
You can target users via the buyer journey with the following types of ads on Instagram:
Awareness: reach, repeatability, brand awareness, and local awareness
Think about buying: Website clicks, video views, reach, and frequency
Conversion: Website conversions, dynamic ads, mobile app installs, and mobile app interaction
Instagram allows you to run ads in the News Feed and Explore tab. Here are the five ad formats currently available on Instagram:
Story ads: You can use photos or videos to display ads on Instagram stories. Users are redirected to the landing page after swiping over the ad.
Image ads: Like Facebook, Instagram image ads help you direct specific actions such as engagement, link clicks, or conversions.
Video ads: You can run video ads of up to 60 seconds in length in square or landscape format.
Carousel ads: These ads allow brands to feature multiple photos or videos in one ad that users can scroll through.
Group ads: Group ads display a primary image or image alongside secondary images arranged in a grid. These ads are similar to group ads on Facebook.
Twitter:
Similar to the platform, Twitter’s advertising solution is very straightforward. It currently offers the following types of ads:
Share Tweet
Video / GIF views
Brand awareness
Website clicks or conversions
Video views during broadcast
Build followers
App installs
Application links
Additionally, brands can also promote a specific hashtag to increase brand awareness. This feature is suitable for large companies and entertainment brands.
Ads appear on Twitter in the News Feed and Search section.
Linkedin:
LinkedIn is a business-oriented platform that brings opportunities for brands and individuals alike to promote themselves. The targeting options on LinkedIn are different compared to Facebook and Twitter and are primarily centered around professional criteria such as education, organization size, sector, job title, etc.
Here are the three main types of LinkedIn promotions you can run on LinkedIn:
Sponsored ads: Sponsored ads appear in the news feed of LinkedIn users on desktop and mobile and provide similar Facebook-like ad types through the awareness, consideration, and journey transformation stages.
InMail: This feature is available to premium LinkedIn users, as they can send individual emails to users who are not in their network. Premium users can send 5 to 30 emails per month depending on the plan, and each response gets one InMail balance back in their account.
Sponsored InMail: Sponsored InMail combines the best email marketing and targeting capabilities of InMails with sponsored inboxes that connect directly to the inbox of active LinkedIn users. This feature is useful for increasing conversions such as boosting content downloads and increasing conference attendance.
snap chat:
Snapchat is popular among millennials and Gen Z fans and thus favors casual and fun content. The social media platform supports the following advertising goals:
Awareness: the brand
Think about buying: app installs, app traffic, website traffic, sharing, video views, lead generation
Conversion: Website and App Conversions, Catalog Sales.
Here are six types of ads on Snapchat that help brands achieve their goals:
Snap Ads: These ads appear in stories and can direct users to your website, app, app store link, or video after swiping.
Group ads: These ads are like those on Facebook and Instagram where the ad displays four thumbnails with one featured link for each thumbnail.
Story ads: Story ads appear on the Discover tab among other stories.
AR Lens: Brands can create custom AR lenses to deliver unique experiences to Snapchatters.
Filters: Filters add a layer of poster or some creative photo and video design.
Commercials: There are six-second non-skippable videos within Snapchat Premium Content.
Most of your customers are on social media, and this allows you to adopt a more nuanced approach to advertising – an approach that designs content based on individual preferences and interests, and if you haven’t yet adopted it as a method for marketing your brand, you are missing an important opportunity.
And if you adopt it the wrong way, you are wasting opportunities and money too.
We recommend that you approve a company that provides this as a Raya Al-Rowad agency, you can request our services or consult a member of our team, we are happy with that.
