Facebook and Instagram as tools for Digital marketing
I consider Facebook and Instagram as the best social media platforms for promoting a brand. This is mainly because of the immense reach they have together.
Instagram has massive world reach with monthly average users numbering 800 million, out of this 800 million only 20% or 160 million are in the USA while the rest of the world accounts for 80% or 640 million users with 500 million daily active users. Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users worldwide.
The demographics of both range from various ages and social segments especially young adults. Facebook and Instagram have high engagement rate as well for their ads compared to other digital platforms like google AdWords and twitter.
How to promote your brand?
If you are creating a new page for a company or a product in face book I suggest you create an Instagram profile as well and link it with the Facebook page.
Benefits of linking your Facebook page and Instagram page is that your Instagram page will give analytics of your Instagram posts. This facility is not available in a normal Instagram account.
In order to promote your ads in Facebook or in Instagram or in both you need to have a Facebook ads manager account which is linked to your normal Facebook profile.
Instagram is not like twitter, where a person or a company can get verified easily. I haven’t really understood how to get verified in Instagram. But as far as I know Instagram authorities gives you the verified ticked mark after they approve you.
Both Facebook and Instagram ad policies are quite difficult to execute.
If a client wants to publish their ads in Facebook and Instagram, the ad should contain only 20% text and 80% visual or back ground. Facebook authorities want the client’s ads to be clean.
I have personally done many ads for Facebook and Instagram and many have been disapproved due to this policy.
In Facebook and Instagram I would recommend that you use local influencers as well with the paid campaigns to get the best results.
In Facebook there are groups where you can post organically.
I am an Indian and I have an Indian Facebook ads manager account, it is in Indian rupees and the minimum daily budget to run an ad is 40 – 80 INR (it changes every time). I don’t know exactly how much is it in other countries.
Facebook allows you to target an individual from the age group of 13+.
Instagram marketing tools:
You can promote your ads for Instagram either from Instagram directly or from Facebook ads manager. For running ads on Instagram you will need to connect it to a Facebook page.
I would recommend an ecommerce website promoting their catalogue for clothes or handbags or makeup to opt for Instagram, mainly because there are more number of women than men on Instagram and so you can get your money’s worth.
In Instagram, promote the photo that you want with one of these options:
Get more website visits, title of this campaign says what is it. You can drive people to your website with a good photo which agrees with Facebook ad policies and a good call to action button such as learn more or watch more or shop now or book now or sign up or contact us with the website link.
More profile visits you can make people to visit your profile, maybe even follow you.
More promotion views as mentioned you will get more views for your photo.
Reach people near an address, one of my campaigns approved in Instagram was for birds on the tree café which carried get directions and call to action buttons. You can choose another option of call now also. You can reach people of 5+km radius. Instagram tells you the number of people using Instagram in that particular area.
Though having very less options of marketing an ad, Instagram is one of the most used photo sharing app by the younger age group. My suggestion would be to run an ad in Instagram for a maximum of 4 to 5 days.
Facebook marketing tools:
There are three types of marketing objectives that Facebook can fulfill.
They are awareness, consideration and conversion.
Under these three broad headings, there are options of choosing which type of ad you want to promote.
- Awareness:
- Brand awareness
- Reach
- Consideration:
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App installs
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Conversion
- Conversions
- Product catalogue sales
- Store visits
These campaigns keep changing from time to time.
There is one more option, promoting your posts on your page. You need to spend money on boosting that particular post to the people who liked your page or to whoever you want to share it with, because even if your page has 10,000 + likes that does not mean that your posts on your page will reach all 10,000 who have liked your page.
Facebook tries to make you spend money all the time. In the recent past I have started promoting stuff in fb and I have seen that many of my organic posts on these pages are reaching more people even without promotion. This is due to the algorithm, it sees you have spent some money before and it tries to make you spend some more money to reach it to a larger audience. Don’t stop spending on fb ads completely.
Try to get a love reaction on your posts rather than likes, angry, ha-ha, and wow reactions as Facebook algorithm pushes out that post or a photo with love reaction more than the other reactions.
For each ad when it crosses 500 impressions you can see a relevance score, this is an indication of how well your ad is doing with the audience. The score is based on a rating 1 to 10. If it is more than 6 it is good. I would suggest that you wait till you reach 500 impressions to check the score, if it is less than 5, I would suggest you stop the ad immediately.
I handle 5 pages/profiles in face book and Instagram. Suppose I want to make the same organic post in all these pages or profiles, there are many tools that will integrate these easily and reduce time spent. The best known tools are Hootsuite and Agora Pulse.
I have been personally using Hootsuite for almost 6 months. It is a lot cheaper than Agora pulse to use.
Comparison of these two platforms for promotion:
- Use Instagram for higher engagement
- Use Facebook for higher audience
- If you want to appeal to a younger age group and women use Instagram.
Comparison of these two platforms with others cost wise:
I have done many paid campaigns in all most all the digital marketing platforms.
I have found AdWords (google network) was the cheapest, next cheapest is Facebook and Instagram, after that is twitter and the costliest is LinkedIn.