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What is social media advertising? Social media advertising is a way of providing digital advertising to a brand’s target audience via social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Social media advertising is MASSIVE for online retailers and is only going to grow.
The number of social media users in 2020 reach 3.6 billion (yes, with a “b”) and by 2025 it is expected to reach 4.41 million and the social media spending is projected to reach US$138,225m in 2021.
Massive numbers like these are thrown around a lot today in order to grab attention. We’ve sort of become immune to them. But I want to lift that veil and ask you to really think about just how impactful that is. Over 45% of the global population is on social media!!
If you’re looking to gain a competitive edge in social media advertising, this post is for you.
I’ve found 10 tools that will make your advertising life SO much easier and propel your campaigns to a whole new level. Here we go!
Starting off with something simple, but practical and incredibly useful, we have the Facebook ads manager app. You can get it for iOS or Android.
With this tool, you can:
All this, right from your phone. The best part is that Facebook designed the app for small- to medium-sized businesses, so you don’t have to be a massive corporation with tons of capital to make the most of it. If you’re new to Facebook, check out this Facebook advertising guide to learn more.
We may be a little biased by mentioning ourselves, but we know you’ll love our tool! We can make your Instagram images shoppable with a “Shop this look” button.
Flowbox allows you to:
You can easily and quickly find the images that your customers are sharing about your Brand, add them to your eCommerce site, and sync those images with your product catalog. There’s one other tool you’ll find very useful when driving sales from your Instagram account: Shoppable Instagram.
All you have to do is add a clicknshop.it link to your bio and Flowbox will create a landing page that looks exactly like your Instagram feed, but shoppable. That way, your followers can buy the products in your pictures just by clicking the “Shop This Look” button.
Why use Flowbox? Our tool can help you increase sales by up to 21%.
Ad Espresso’s Facebook Ads Compass is a free tool that allows you to see the effectiveness of your social media ad campaigns. It’s like a report card for your Facebook ads.
This free report answers the questions:
Essentially, it makes your Facebook ads analysis really straightforward and easy. It will also show you how you are doing compared to others in your industry, which is a nice feature. And you can’t beat free!
Fun fact: HootSuite recently purchased Ad Espresso, so we’ll be seeing a lot of growth from this tool. Their goal is to combine organic and paid social media growth into one platform.
How much time do you spend crafting images for social media? It’s a time-consuming and often tedious process.
Easy Inspire seeks to make that process quick, painless, and nearly automatic. It’s the “easiest way to design beautiful visual content in seconds.”
With EasyInspire, you can:
Quuu is a fascinating software that allows you to promote your content to influencers across nearly any category with the click of a button (and a few bucks).
Basically, you can either be a promoter or an advertiser with Quuu. When you purchase promotion, they send curated, hand-picked content to their influencers. From there, if those influencers like the content, they’ll share it – thus increasing the reach of your social media posts (and website content).
Pro Tip: ONLY send high-quality, well-written content to be selected for Quuu. They personally review every submission before allowing it to be promoted to their network, and they’re fairly picky about what they send. I recommend a really interesting product or an awesome blog post.
Here’s some insight from Matthew of Quuu on how to get the most of their tool:
Adding a maximum of two relevant and well-researched hashtags to a Quuu Promote submission (on the Twitter Share) makes a big impact to the engagement levels of your post. Also, taking the time to add any relevant @usernames of key people or companies that feature in the article is a great way to draw their attention to all the shares on social, so be sure to add the author and any other key people (assuming you have space with the character count).
Tweepi, aside from having an awesome name, is a really easy way to grow your Twitter following.
As you can see from the image above, Tweepi allows you to:
I asked Amer, the founder of Tweepi, for some extra tips on getting the most from the platform. Here’s what he said:
Tweepi helps hundreds of thousands of marketers grow their brands on Twitter for the fraction of the cost of conventional Ads. Tweepi does that by facilitating searching-for and finding relevant Twitter users, then engaging them by following them, adding them to list, or mentioning them. If your Twitter presence is significantly relevant, this process helps grow your number of Twitter followers in a fast, targeted and organic manner.
SoGro was created by Aaron, the same guy who created EasyInspire, tool number four on this list. Basically, SoGro does all the work for you to increase your Twitter, Pinterest, and/or Instagram followers (and engagement).
The way SoGro works is:
Alchemy is one of Facebook’s original Ads API partners. That means they’ve been working with Facebook ads longer than nearly anyone else in the business. As such, they know their stuff.
While less of a tool and more of a partner to help you with your Facebook advertising, Alchemy has been able to do some great things for people.
With Alchemy, you can:
Connor Maddy, a marketing representative of Alchemy, had a few tips to share to get the most of this tool:
“Alchemy Social is Experian’s social media advertising platform that enables marketers to build audiences using Experian’s extensive data sources and deploy them in Facebook and Twitter. The platform sits on top of the social networks’ own advertising capabilities, allowing marketers to build more consistent and accurate audiences. The key benefits stem from the ability to use a range of data sets including a combination of online and offline insights.
The platform can be operated in a SaaS fashion but by far the best results come when used with the managed service option which provides access to Experian’s huge range of data expertise. With access to the ConsumerView database and other sophisticated Experian segmentation capabilities (Mosaic, Financial Strategy Segments etc.), it’s possible to build accurate and robust audiences. Experian’s experts can use brands’ first party data and insights to create audience personas based on key characteristics and then, with Alchemy Social and Experian’s third party data, find lookalikes of best fit customers on social media.
Through more accurate advertising, marketers can improve the experience they offer to their customers, cutting out the irrelevant spam and making sure people see more of the information that they’re actually interested in. The only way to do this is through detailed consumer insight and an understanding of your customers.”
If you’d rather use a tool than pay someone to help with your promotion, Qwaya is for you. Another benefit of Qwaya is that you pay a flat fee rather than based on ad spend, so if you’re a high-spender, this tool ends up being cheaper.
Two of the best features of Qwaya are:
These tools allow you to optimize your advertisements for the highest possible conversion, as well as show you an at-a-glance view of which ads are currently running and when.
This is more of a feature within a tool, but it’s not an obvious one, so I figured it was worth mentioning. Facebook exclusion targeting is a piece of Facebook ads platform. It allows you to exclude certain people from seeing your ads.
Some examples of ways to leverage exclusion include:
See Facebook’s Help resource for instructions on setting up exclusion targeting.
Flowbox is a powerful tool for collecting UGC and seamlessly integrating it into your social media advertising campaigns. By leveraging Flowbox, you can efficiently gather UGC from various social media platforms by tracking specific hashtags or mentions related to your brand. Once you have identified the content you wish to use, Flowbox allows you to request media rights from the original creators directly through the platform, ensuring that you have the necessary permissions to repurpose their work. After securing these rights, you can curate and embed the UGC into your own social media ads, thereby enhancing the authenticity and appeal of your campaigns. This process not only engages your audience but also fosters a sense of community and trust around your brand, as potential customers see real-life testimonials and experiences from existing users.
Want to increase the impact of your social media advertising? Leverage UGC for better results. Book a demo of Flowbox to learn how it works.
While social media advertising doesn’t require tools, they make a smart marketer even more efficient.
In fact, these tools will allow you to take your game to the next level. You’ll be able to blast past your competition and grow your eCommerce sales.
