Using social media ads to promote your products and services can be a great way to grow your audience. However, learning how to properly use this type of advertising can be difficult and expensive. Many people who want to learn more about social media ad software options may not know where to start. The good news is you’ve found the right article as I’ll explore several popular options for social media advertising software within different price ranges.
Social media advertising software helps companies advertise on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social media advertising products allow advertisers to buy, manage, and place social ads to reach the wide-spanning audiences using these sites. Social media advertising is typically managed by a company’s marketing team or a third-party ad agency and can be leveraged to drive both brand awareness and direct response initiatives. Social media advertising software makes it easy for businesses to tap into the massive audiences on social media sites. Social media advertising includes both first-party and third-party platforms. First-party platforms are those offered by the social media site directly, giving advertisers direct access to the sites’ ad offerings, and are typically used by small and mid-market businesses or those new to social media advertising. Third-party platforms integrate with social networks and typically offer more streamlined workflows, better scalability, and access to more than one social network. Social media advertising functionality may be offered through a single best-of-breed product, or bundled into a cross-channel platform that may also possess capabilities for search, display, mobile, or video advertising.
To qualify for inclusion in the Social Media Advertising category, a product must:Offer tools for uploading or creating social adsBe able to buy and serve social ads on at least one social media siteProvide workflows for effectively managing and trafficking ads within the platformTrack key success metrics reach, conversions, and ROAS
Social Media Advertising Tool #1: Facebook Ads Manager App
Starting off with something simple, but practical and incredibly useful, we have the Facebook ads manager app. You can get it for iOS or Android.
With this tool, you can:
- Track ad performance
- Edit existing ads
- Revise ad budgets and schedules
- Receive push notifications
- Create ads right from the app (using your Facebook posts and photos, or images from your device)
All this, right from your phone. The best part is that Facebook designed the app for small- to medium-sized businesses, so you don’t have to be a massive corporation with tons of capital to make the most of it.
If you’re new to Facebook, check out this Facebook advertising guide to learn more.
Social Media Advertising Tool #2: Photoslurp
We may be a little biased by mentioning ourselves, but we know you’ll love our tool! We can make your Instagram images shoppable with a “Shop this look” button.
Photoslurp allows you to:
- Make your customer’s images shoppable with a buy button
- Leverage User Generated Content in your social media ads.
- Publish customer’s photos to your social media accounts, website, app, and more
- present Trustpilot star ratings within Photoslurp visual customer content integrations
You can easily and quickly find the images that your customers are sharing about your Brand, add them to your eCommerce site, and sync those images with your product catalog.
There’s one other tool you’ll find very useful when driving sales from your Instagram account: Shoppable Instagram.
All you have to do is add a clicknshop.it link to your bio and Photoslurp will create a landing page that looks exactly like your Instagram feed, but shoppable. That way, your followers can buy the products in your pictures just by clicking the “Shop This Look” button.
Want to use UGC to increase engagement and conversion
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Why use Photoslurp? Our tool can help you increase sales by up to 21%.
Social Media Advertising Tool #3: Ad Espresso’s Facebook Ads Compass
Ad Espresso’s Facebook Ads Compass is a free tool that allows you to see the effectiveness of your social media ad campaigns. It’s like a report card for your Facebook ads.
This free report answers the questions:
- How much are you spending on Facebook ads?
- What kind of ROI are you getting (in terms of reach, clicks, etc.)?
- Who is clicking on your ads (age, gender, country, placement, etc.)?
- What’s making you money and what’s just a waste of time?
Essentially, it makes your Facebook ads analysis really straightforward and easy. It will also show you how you are doing compared to others in your industry, which is a nice feature. And you can’t beat free!
Fun fact: HootSuite recently purchased Ad Espresso, so we’ll be seeing a lot of growth from this tool. Their goal is to combine organic and paid social media growth into one platform.
Social Media Advertising Tool #4: Easy Inspire
How much time do you spend crafting images for social media? It’s a time-consuming and often tedious process.
Easy Inspire seeks to make that process quick, painless, and nearly automatic. It’s the “easiest way to design beautiful visual content in seconds.”
With EasyInspire, you can:
- Create inspirational images to share on social media in seconds
- Design an image of any size for any network
- Brand images with your logo and brand name
- Get inspired every morning with inspirational quotes at the click of a button
Social Media Advertising Tool #5: Quuu Promote
Quuu is a fascinating software that allows you to promote your content to influencers across nearly any category with the click of a button (and a few bucks).
Basically, you can either be a promoter or an advertiser with Quuu. When you purchase promotion, they send curated, hand-picked content to their influencers. From there, if those influencers like the content, they’ll share it – thus increasing the reach of your social media posts (and website content).
Pro Tip: ONLY send high-quality, well-written content to be selected for Quuu. They personally review every submission before allowing it to be promoted to their network, and they’re fairly picky about what they send. I recommend a really interesting product or an awesome blog post.
Here’s some insight from Matthew of Quuu on how to get the most of their tool:
Adding a maximum of two relevant and well-researched hashtags to a Quuu Promote submission (on the Twitter Share) makes a big impact to the engagement levels of your post. Also, taking the time to add any relevant @usernames of key people or companies that feature in the article is a great way to draw their attention to all the shares on social, so be sure to add the author and any other key people (assuming you have space with the character count).
Social Media Advertising Tool #6: Tweepi
Tweepi, aside from having an awesome name, is a really easy way to grow your Twitter following.
As you can see from the image above, Tweepi allows you to:
- Find relevant users who would be interested in following you
- Engage with those users by sending them relevant content
- Unfollow anyone who isn’t engaging with your brand
- Find influencers to help you grow your brand
I asked Amer, the founder of Tweepi, for some extra tips on getting the most from the platform. Here’s what he said:
Tweepi helps hundreds of thousands of marketers grow their brands on Twitter for the fraction of the cost of conventional Ads. Tweepi does that by facilitating searching-for and finding relevant Twitter users, then engaging them by following them, adding them to list, or mentioning them. If your Twitter presence is significantly relevant, this process helps grow your number of Twitter followers in a fast, targeted and organic manner.
Social Media Advertising Tool #7: SoGro
SoGro was created by Aaron, the same guy who created EasyInspire, tool number four on this list. Basically, SoGro does all the work for you to increase your Twitter, Pinterest, and/or Instagram followers (and engagement).
The way SoGro works is:
- You sign up for an account, choosing which social media profiles you want to grow.
- SoGro hand-picks the target market they think is right for you, based on your niche.
- You continue to add content as you normally would.
- SoGro follows, unfollows, comments, and likes based on an organic level of growth to get the highest possible engagement.
- You log on every day to engagement, more followers, and more customers.
Social Media Advertising Tool #8: Alchemy
Alchemy is one of Facebook’s original Ads API partners. That means they’ve been working with Facebook ads longer than nearly anyone else in the business. As such, they know their stuff.
While less of a tool and more of a partner to help you with your Facebook advertising, Alchemy has been able to do some great things for people.
With Alchemy, you can:
- Improve your Facebook ads so you’re not wasting money on stuff that doesn’t work.
- Find a better target fit to increase conversions.
- Get expert guidance whenever you need it.
Connor Maddy, a marketing representative of Alchemy, had a few tips to share to get the most of this tool:
“Alchemy Social is Experian’s social media advertising platform that enables marketers to build audiences using Experian’s extensive data sources and deploy them in Facebook and Twitter. The platform sits on top of the social networks’ own advertising capabilities, allowing marketers to build more consistent and accurate audiences. The key benefits stem from the ability to use a range of data sets including a combination of online and offline insights.
The platform can be operated in a SaaS fashion but by far the best results come when used with the managed service option which provides access to Experian’s huge range of data expertise. With access to the ConsumerView database and other sophisticated Experian segmentation capabilities (Mosaic, Financial Strategy Segments etc.), it’s possible to build accurate and robust audiences. Experian’s experts can use brands’ first party data and insights to create audience personas based on key characteristics and then, with Alchemy Social and Experian’s third party data, find lookalikes of best fit customers on social media.
Through more accurate advertising, marketers can improve the experience they offer to their customers, cutting out the irrelevant spam and making sure people see more of the information that they’re actually interested in. The only way to do this is through detailed consumer insight and an understanding of your customers.”
Social Media Advertising Tool #9: Qwaya
If you’d rather use a tool than pay someone to help with your promotion, Qwaya is for you. Another benefit of Qwaya is that you pay a flat fee rather than based on ad spend, so if you’re a high-spender, this tool ends up being cheaper.
Two of the best features of Qwaya are:
- A/B testing your ads
- Ad scheduling
These tools allow you to optimize your advertisements for the highest possible conversion, as well as show you an at-a-glance view of which ads are currently running and when.
Social Media Advertising Tool #10: Facebook Exclusion Targeting
This is more of a feature within a tool, but it’s not an obvious one, so I figured it was worth mentioning. Facebook exclusion targeting is a piece of Facebook ads platform. It allows you to exclude certain people from seeing your ads.
Some examples of ways to leverage exclusion include:
- Exclude your existing customers from a promotion designed to generate new leads.
- Target your website visitors (as a custom audience), but exclude those who’ve already converted.
- Target people who like a competitor’s page but exclude those who already like yours.
See Facebook’s Help resource for instructions on setting up exclusion targeting.
Conclusion
Social media advertising software isn’t a thing of the past anymore. In fact, social media is a big part of Facebook Ads success. There are two aspects to Facebook Ads which is creating an ad, and managing multiple ad accounts. I’m going to take you through the process here and show you how to create a successful ad campaign.