The importance of incorporating paid social media into your digital marketing plan has never been higher. With the diminishing organic reach on Facebook, the vast potential audience on Twitter, and the significant amount of time potential customers spend on social media platforms each week, neglecting social media advertising means missing out on valuable opportunities.

This article highlights the top 10 paid social media hacks, derived from a recent webinar with Hanapin Marketing’s Matt Umbro.

Paid Social Media Hack #10: Quality Score in Facebook and Twitter Ads

While Quality Score is a well-known metric for AdWords and Bing Ads, it holds equal significance on Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook’s Relevance Score

Facebook’s equivalent of Quality Score is Relevance Score, determined by the level of engagement your ads generate. Engaging images and captivating social media copy contribute to higher engagement, ultimately boosting your Relevance Score.

The figure above illustrates that a high Relevance Score should be a primary objective for Facebook advertisers. Higher scores result in increased impression shares and reduced costs-per-engagement, optimizing both visibility and cost-effectiveness of your ads.

Twitter’s Quality Adjusted Bid

Twitter calculates Quality Score based on three key factors:

• Relevance
• Resonance
• Recency Relevance, as expected, assesses the alignment of your tweets with your audience’s interests. Resonance gauges engagement levels, including favorites, retweets, and replies. Recency emphasizes the timeliness of tweets, favoring “fresher” content. These three “Rs,” along with your bid amount, determine quality-adjusted bids on Twitter. Importantly, research indicates that for every one-point increase in engagement, Twitter advertisers experience an estimated 5% reduction in cost-per-engagement:

This translates to highly relevant ads potentially costing as low as ONE PENNY PER RETWEET!

Just as you prioritize Quality Score in AdWords and Bing Ads, devote equal, if not greater, attention to Quality Score on Facebook and Twitter.

Paid Social Media Hack #9: Tweet Often, Only Promote Your Best Stuff

While promoting a variety of social content might seem appealing, it can dilute the impact of your top-performing content, which should be your sole focus for paid promotion. Focus on promoting only your absolute best content – not just the “good” or “great” pieces, but the ones already resonating with your audience and garnering significant attention and engagement. This approach yielded remarkable results for nexus-security with a blog post about the decline of Google+:

Recognizing the topic’s relevance, a strategic decision was made to invest $250 in promoting the tweet, resulting in an impressive 1,500 retweets and over 100,000 visitors. This exceptional ROI underscores the significance of promoting only your best content, leaving trivial content to others.

How to Find High-Engagement Tweets

Exporting data from your Twitter Analytics dashboard provides the simplest method for identifying high-engagement tweets.

By examining engagement metrics such as retweets, favorites, and replies within the data, you can easily pinpoint the top-performing tweets deserving of amplification.

Paid Social Media Hack #8: Leverage the Power of Keyword Targeting and Hashtags

While Facebook lacks keyword targeting options, requiring advertisers to target specific interests, Twitter proves to be a goldmine for this strategy. However, the mechanics of keyword targeting differ significantly between social media and Google search. Let’s compare keyword targeting on Google versus Twitter:

Keyword targeting on Google often feels robotic and overly formal, resembling “caveman English.” In contrast, social keywords on Twitter adopt a more conversational, informational approach, incorporating hashtags for a more natural and less salesy feel. It’s crucial to note that on Twitter, targeting encompasses users who have used specific keywords in their tweets, in addition to keyword searches on the platform.

The Ridiculous Power of Hashtags

Hashtags hold immense power for Twitter advertisers. They signify high user engagement and simplify the process of targeting relevant users based on topics or interests. The following tweet exemplifies this power. By simply incorporating the hashtag #gameofthrones, it garnered nearly 800 retweets. While the tweet might have received some retweets without the hashtag, reaching such high engagement levels would have been improbable.

Approach keyword targeting on social media thoughtfully and recognize the significant role of hashtags. Combining these elements strategically can yield exceptional results. Note that replicating this on Facebook would involve targeting users interested in Game of Thrones.

Paid Social Media Hack #7: Increase Commercial Intent Using In-Market Segments

Despite the massive audience reach offered by social media advertising, these platforms lack the inherent commercial intent of search ads. To address this, narrowing down the target audience to users primed for purchase can be achieved through in-market segments. Data brokers provide Facebook with detailed purchase history information on its users, enabling marketers to target highly specific audience segments based on past purchases, visited locations, and other credit card-related activities. The following example showcases a segment used to advertise nexus-security’s services on Facebook, specifically targeting individuals who have previously purchased business marketing software:

This strategy yields a potential Facebook audience of 6.1 million users. As illustrated, Facebook partners with Epsilon to access this purchase data, providing a description of the audience segment and its data source. Twitter offers a similar feature, leveraging the same audience data as Facebook. The example below highlights a coffee retailer targeting individuals identified as coffee buyers through behavioral profile data provided by Datalogix to Twitter:

Custom audiences can be defined as broadly or narrowly as desired. However, keep in mind that greater specificity generally results in a smaller audience size.

Paid Social Media Hack #6: Demographic Targeting

In addition to custom audiences, targeting based on demographic data is crucial. While AdWords advertisers are familiar with demographic targeting, Twitter and Facebook offer more comprehensive options, allowing advertisers to target users based on factors such as education level, household size, income, life events (e.g., marriage, childbirth), and even net worth. Twitter and Facebook provide over 2,000 such options. Here are a few examples of demographic targeting options available on Twitter:

!Paid social media Twitter demographic targeting Segmenting audiences in this manner ensures that your ads reach the most promising potential customers. Instead of broadly targeting everyone on social media, focusing on the right audience yields higher engagement rates and lower costs per engagement.

Paid Social Media Hack #5: Social Media Remarketing

Remarketing is indispensable for any marketer, but it holds even greater importance in paid social media campaigns. Given the substantial time spent on social media, tracking non-converting visitors to your profiles for retargeting is essential. However, remarketing on social media differs significantly from remarketing on the Google Display Network. One major distinction lies in the visibility of remarketing ads. Many remarketing ads on the Display Network remain unseen:

In some verticals, viewability for remarketing ads falls below 45%. The figure below highlights the particularly low viewability rates in categories like Hobbies & Leisure:

Page position contributes significantly to this disparity in viewability. For display remarketers, strategic ad placement is vital, as not all users scroll to every section of a page.

However, page position becomes irrelevant for social media remarketers. Timelines scroll indefinitely, eliminating positioning concerns and significantly boosting viewability, which is a major advantage.

Custom Website Audiences in Facebook

Facebook’s Custom Website Audiences feature enables remarketing campaigns by allowing you to specify the range of pages within your cookie pool for retargeting.

Tailored Website Audiences in Twitter

Twitter’s Tailored Website Audiences function serves a similar purpose, allowing you to define the pages included in your retargeting cookie pool.

Product Ads on Facebook

A compelling aspect of Facebook remarketing is the ability to utilize product ads directly within the platform. Similar to Google’s Shopping ads, these ads target visitors based on their purchase history and shopping patterns and boast an appealing visual format.

This ad format effectively engages users who have abandoned their shopping carts, capitalizing on their social media browsing during downtime to encourage conversions.

Paid Social Media Hack #4: Custom Audiences

Custom audiences represent a relatively recent yet powerful addition to social media advertising. While only available for a little over a year, this feature has revolutionized display ad targeting and is a must-have for marketers. Early remarketing efforts relied on website-based targeting:

Over time, targeting options expanded to include keywords and retargeting. However, custom audiences now take center stage, focusing on specific interests, demographics, and even personal identities. Identity-based targeting marks a significant leap forward in retargeting, shifting from assumed behaviors to unique online identities. This enables highly targeted campaigns with specific parameters, ensuring that the right message reaches the right audience at the optimal time. Advertisers can now target users based on email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook IDs, Twitter handles, and uploaded customer lists to create precisely segmented custom audiences:

Facebook and Twitter then match uploaded data, such as phone numbers, with user profiles in their systems. This creates connections between sales or customer data and corresponding social media profiles, with match rates typically ranging from 20% to 50%. Tools like Full Contact facilitate the process by identifying social media IDs associated with email addresses, further enhancing match rates. Facebook refers to this approach as “people-based marketing,” drawing parallels to email marketing but with significantly greater effectiveness. Consider the drawbacks of traditional email marketing compared to people-based marketing:

This method offers an exceptionally powerful and cost-effective way to attract new business through paid social, providing all the benefits of email marketing without the downsides. While email marketing remains valuable, people-based marketing serves as a complementary tool for content promotion and increased exposure.

Paid Social Media Hack #3: Insanely Powerful New Ad Formats

The traditional marketing funnel, heavily reliant on desktop usage, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Paid social media, predominantly accessed via mobile devices, offers a way to bypass the funnel entirely by leveraging innovative ad formats.

Facebook Call Buttons

Facebook’s Call buttons empower businesses relying on phone calls to streamline the customer journey, allowing mobile prospects to connect directly without navigating complex web forms.

Call buttons prove highly effective due to the higher value of phone calls compared to web form submissions. On average, phone calls generate leads three times more valuable than other inquiry methods, making it crucial to simplify the call initiation process for potential customers. With over 500 million users accessing Facebook solely through mobile devices, such ad formats hold immense importance. Similarly, Twitter’s user base comprises 80% mobile users, rendering traditional desktop-focused conversion funnels obsolete. Embrace the power of pay-per-lead marketing by leveraging social media ad formats and discarding outdated conversion funnels designed for desktop search traffic.

Paid Social Media Hack #2: The Flywheel Effect

To clarify, a flywheel is a mechanical device used to power machinery. These devices, often quite large, require substantial energy to initiate movement. However, once spinning, flywheels possess significant momentum and can continue rotating even without a power source.

This analogy perfectly encapsulates the flywheel effect in paid social media. By investing initial effort, you can reap long-term rewards with minimal ongoing effort. Any effort invested in growing your social media presence generates compounding returns over time. As your profiles gain momentum, achieving greater results requires less effort. It might take considerable time to build an initial following, but with consistent effort, growth accelerates exponentially. Engagement snowballs, and early investments pave the way for achieving “critical mass,” where engagement and growth skyrocket with minimal input.

Paid Social Media Hack #1: Free Clicks!

The ultimate paid social media hack revolves around securing free clicks, which are universally coveted. This hack operates on a “buy-one-get-more” principle, where each paid click, like, or retweet often yields three or more organic interactions. When you pay to promote a tweet, you’re guaranteed at least one engagement. However, as your followers engage with the promoted tweet through retweets, replies, or favorites, it appears on their followers’ timelines, significantly expanding the reach without additional cost. In the example below, a $20 investment to promote content on Twitter generated substantial organic impressions (blue) in addition to paid impressions (yellow). This organic exposure came at no extra cost, purely driven by the engagement of existing followers.

Furthermore, this approach can attract new followers. Social media’s interactive nature, coupled with various engagement options for sponsored posts, often leads to increased engagement and a surge in followers or fans. These top 10 paid social media hacks provide valuable techniques and insights applicable to your campaigns. Special thanks to Matt Umbro for his contribution to the informative webinar, which can be accessed below: