Social Media has evolved; shouldn’t your marketing program do the same?

As of this very second, there are CPC and CPM auction based opportunities on Facebook, YouTube, Yelp, Linked in, and soon to come for Twitter but yet Social Media is still considered a single entity and practice in the industry. Much like the world of Search, Social Media is evolving into two distinct practices of Paid (PSM) and Organic Social Media (OSM). That’s right you heard it here first.

Like Organic Search, Organic Social Media is resource/labor intensive especially without the use of technology to help automate the optimization process. A well oiled program requires a well thought-out/integrated strategy, constant updates, and excellent/fresh copy writing. The analytics here are currently hard to classify and segment because you are attempting to make sense of millions of human conversations that use static images, video, links, likes, and basically anything you can share online. There is tons of noise, making sense of relevant sharing is challenging to automate but not impossible. People love their sarcasm, so do I; try to make a program that can read that. So what can an advertiser do to help their Social Media program gain instant exposure and traction with actionable metrics?

Paid Social Media!

The quickest way to get in front of as many eyeballs you can pay for is through these CPC and CPM auction opportunities that are currently in their infancy stage. The metrics here are also much easier to read and readily available. Let’s take Facebook text and logo ads as an example.

Facebook is the current king of social media with a user base of 400 million and growing (all privacy concerns set aside). Another thing to keep in mind with Facebook is the amount of time people spend on the site.

Think about it, do you spend more time on Google or Facebook? On Google, I get what I need and I’m out in an instant. On the book, I’ll get an IM, read about a friend’s latest break up and on and on. The advertising potential here is huge and currently untapped by large advertisers.

With Facebook you are able to target paid ads to your audience based on location, gender, income, interests, relationship status, age, language, education, employment, and more with an ad unit that is uses text and image. When building out Facebook campaigns, you get on the fly audience reach estimation so you always have an idea of how broad or narrow your campaign will be. Using a well implemented analytics strategy and Paid Social Media Best Practices, advertisers will be able to continuously refine their Paid Social Media programs to yield the highest returns and also influence their other media channels through metric insights from Facebook.

Facebook Paid ad results basically become like a huge focus group. Through Facebook’s reporting, you will get insight into all your converting traffic’s demographic attributes which you can then use to help select what sites to run your display/in-text campaigns on, what life style keywords to target on search, which demographic targets should you use for other social media opportunities and help gauge whether your Organic Social Media campaign is actually a success or failure. Using Covario’s proprietary software, Paid Search Insight, I am able to benchmark my Paid Social media against all my other paid media on the fly to answer the hardest question facing advertisers’ everyday; where should I spend my dollar?

Actionable Insight #1: Make Paid Social Media part of your marketing program with a well thought out analytics implementation to benchmark against your other marketing channels. Test, refine, rinse and repeat.

Actionable Insight #2: Use the demographic learnings from your Paid Social media to guide your marketing decisions on other channels.

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