For a while Facebook was the only outlet for effective social media advertising and the best way to promote your brand to customers. In the past few months though, things have been changing with the advent of promotional tweets and accounts on Twitter. On top of this Twitter has recently announced that it will be opening up this service to smaller business as well as the big multinationals that currently use it.
With two methods to promote your business in the world of social media advertisers are going to have to choose which service is best for them, unless there lucky enough to afford to target both of course.
Twitter offers advertisers:
Promoted Tweets – allow you to reach people who don’t follow your account. They will appear in a followers timeline as a search result and can be viewed in the same way as a regular tweet. If a user searches for a keyword your promoted tweet will appear.
Promoted Accounts were the very first form of advertising to appear on Twitter are used by large multinational brands. Promoted Accounts will appear on the Who to Follow section of a users Twitter homepage. Twitter will identify similar accounts being followed before placing the account on a user’s homepage, so for example a company selling vegetarian food wouldn’t have their promoted Account shown to a user who follows McDonald’s and Berger King.
Promoted Trends allow companies to appear on top of the Twitter trending topics list. The trending topics list shows the most talked about things on Twitter at the time. When a user clicks on the trending topic they will see all Twitter conversations connected to it.
Twitter Facts:
175 million users
26-34 average age of user
Facebook offer advertisers:
Facebook Adverts allows advertisers and marketers to target specific users using just a few keywords. The adverts appear on the right hand side of the screen and will appear alongside a few other adverts. To fit in with the style of Facebook the ads are very simple using just a handful of words and a picture. A business will be charged every time a Facebook user clicks on the advert and works in the same sort of way as adverts in Google.
Facebook like Adverts differ from normal Facebook ads in that they encourage a user to like a company rather than visit their website. By clicking on the like button users will be able to see update from that company including any special offers or promotions.
Facebook Facts:
550 million users
18-34 average age of users
For now the king of social media advertising remains Facebook as it offers the most coast effective way for business of all size to reach millions of users. Twitters ventures in to social media advertising remains relatively and will no doubt grow over the months and years to come and could one day soon prove to be just as affective for advertisers and Facebook.
