Only a couple of years ago using social media as part of your business’s marketing plan would have been seen as a waste of time – and not very business like at all. Today, that’s all changed and even the most “serious” of businesses have opted to tweet and post their way through the recession.

A recent study across six European countries found that 23% of IT decision makers use social media to support their buying decisions and now, it’s not just about the free aspect that social media offers, marketers are now investing heavily in Facebook advertising and promoted tweets.

Although not free, cost-per-click (or CPC) campaigns can be very cheap yet they still allow for comprehensive tracking of their effectiveness and full traceability. Advertising on Social Media sites enables you to target users by location, age, gender and interests, which means that your adverts are going to be seen by exactly the right people; you can choose your audience very specifically. This is different to Google AdWords, which doesn’t have the same knowledge about its users. B2B advertisers who once had difficulty in targeting B2B customers,  can use social media sites like Facebook to target their products and services more efficiently. Google Adwords can also be more expensive for businesses so there is really no harm in moving a portion of the Adowrds budget onto something like Facebook. It’s very quick and easy to set up and you can have your advert live within just a couple of hours. If you’d like to talk to us about this, call 0845 33 00 890 or email us: info@recklessnewmedia.com.

If you use Facebook, you may have noticed that now, when you update your status, Facebook uses your geographical location and logs when you are. This information is then used by Facebook advertising so that Facebook users are exposed to exactly the right kind of adverts, specific to where they are and what they’re talking about. It’s clever stuff but for companies like yours, it’s a doddle to access. Just set up your account, set your budget, type your advert and away you go.

Twitter is also got in on the act back in 2009 and this year has rolled out Promoted Tweets to all of its users. This form of social media advertising is notoriously expensive with advertisers spending around $100,00 but it’s also proven to be successful and around 80% of advertisers have renewed the campaigns – perhaps they will do more accessible versions of it….fingers crossed!

If you’d like to talk to us about getting your social media advertising set up, call 0845 33 00 890 or email us: info@recklessnewmedia.com