One of the most important things to know about social media advertising tools is that there are many different types of them. Each social media site has its own types of advertising tools, and they don’t all work in the same way. It is therefore essential to understand what each type is in order to choose the right one for you. You also need to think carefully about where your advertising budget comes from so you can narrow down the right adverts for it.
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.
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.
Biteable
Creating content for social media is an essential part of the game. Visual content gets three times more engagement on Twitter than plain ol’ text, so good visual content can help you take it to the next level.
With Biteable, you can easily create engaging, entertaining, and informative short videos to share on social media.
With a host of free video templates, footage, music, and animated scenes, Biteable is a godsend for anyone who wants to create studio-quality quickly without needing expensive resources like film or sound recording equipment.
Biteable was created to be super easy to use and one of the cheapest tools of its type on the market. Most features are available even with free accounts (it’s pretty cheap to upgrade to Premium anyway) so why not add a bit more excitement and spark to your social media content by creating some short, super-shareable videos?
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.”
Buffer
Buffer started off as a scheduling tool for Twitter. Today, it supports all the major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google + (for the one person who still uses it.) Let’s take a look.
You can do some pretty neat things with Buffer:
- Use the chrome extension to add articles and content from the web to your Buffer queue or share content on the go.
- Automatically shortens links you share. If you’re Bitly user, you can connect your accounts.
- Upload custom photos and videos (or use ones pulled from the article you shared).
- Access complex analytics to track your content’s performance.
- Create a posting schedule so your content gets spread out throughout the day.
- Reply to posts from inside Buffer.
- Add team members.
A social media dashboard like Buffer helps you fill your social media feed with relevant and exciting content without spending half your life logged in to Facebook and Twitter.
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.
AdEspresso
Social media advertising is complex and can feel like you’re taking a shot in the dark. That’s where AdEspresso, the master of the A/B test, comes in.
A tool that allows real-time analysis of Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads, AdEspresso takes the guesswork out of how your ads are resonating with your audiences in accordance with your campaign name and targeting details.
You can create and manage ads for all three platforms in one place and then see what’s working (and what’s not) while your campaign is live. You systematically test different images, headlines, ad copy, and so on, until you find the perfect combination.
Ad creation and optimisation is quick and easy, with a customizable dashboard which allows you to view the most important metrics in a single place. You’ll end up with always-on campaigns that will monitor your Facebook Pages and immediately promote new posts, and use smart filters to define what’s going to be promoted and for how long.
And rather than manually syncing your Lead Ads into your CRM or email marketing, you can keep your leads, contacts, and audiences synched with your Facebook Ad Account.
If you want to take the guesswork out of a complicated system and streamline your efforts, give AdEspresso a go this year.
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.
Tweeps Map
Brian D. Evans, founder, Influencive
“The problem with a lot of marketing these days is that it’s not laser targeted and is far too broad. I use Tweeps Map because it gives me a visual representation of where my followers are geographically. I can then run targeting to followers from specific areas and make sure that the content is relevant and valuable for those followers.”
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Conclusion
There are a lot of great tools out there, with new ones popping up all the time.
The key is to find tools that support your marketing efforts, and invest the time in getting to know them. Don’t be afraid to add new tools to your kit, but don’t discard the old ones just because something fresh and shiny has turned up.
While social media advertising doesn’t require tools, they make a smart marketer even more efficient.
In fact, these tools will allow you to take your game to the next level. You’ll be able to blast past your competition and grow your eCommerce sales.