The Silent Rise of LinkedIn to 500M Members: What Marketers Need to Know for 2018 [SSM069]

What if I told you that LinkedIn, a social media platform that is now 14 years old, is the next big opportunity for marketers and brands?

While much of the focus over the last few years has been on perfecting our Facebook and Instagram marketing strategies, LinkedIn has been silently growing their user base to more than 500 million users.

The reason for this sudden growth?

LinkedIn is no longer known only for their résumé and job searching capabilities. It’s evolving into a thriving network of incredible content, influencers, and networking opportunities unmatched by other social media platforms.

In episode #69 of The Science of Social Media, we explore the many features that make LinkedIn such a powerful platform for brands and what marketers need to know going into 2018.

Let’s dive in!

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The silent rise of LinkedIn: What marketers need to know

The LinkedIn journey to 500M members

If you were to ask me to describe LinkedIn in 2015, I might have said something along the lines of, “a great professional network” or “the perfect place to find a job.” Now, as we close out 2017, it’s clear that LinkedIn is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the world of B2C and B2B marketing.

Microsoft must have seen something in the rising star as well – officially acquiring LinkedIn for $26.2 billion at the end of 2016 in one of the largest social media deals in history.

A quick look at LinkedIn’s journey to 500 million members:

• 2003 (0 members): Launch
• 2005 (1.6M members): Introduction of Jobs & Subscriptions
• 2006 (4.2M members): Launch of public profiles for members
• 2009 (33M members): Jeff Weiner joins LinkedIn as president
• 2011 (140M members): LinkedIn goes public
• 2013 (250M members): 10th anniversary of LinkedIn
• 2015 (330M members): $1.5B acquisition of Lynda.com. Launch of Pulse
• 2016 (400M members): Microsoft acquires LinkedIn for $26.2B
• 2017 (500M members): 100,000 new articles published weekly

What’s most astonishing is how fast LinkedIn has grown over the last six years. Between 2011 and 2017, LinkedIn’s user base grew from 140 million to 500 million – shattering the growth rate in previous periods.

LinkedIn demographics

One of the more intriguing aspects of LinkedIn is the demographics of their users.

• Twenty-nine percent of online adults use LinkedIn
• Fifty-six percent of users are male and 44 percent are female
• Fifty-one percent of users have a college degree
• Thirteen percent of millennials (15 to 34-year-olds) use LinkedIn
• Forty-four percent of users earn more than $75,000 a year
• Forty-one percent of millionaires use LinkedIn
• The average CEO has 930 connections
• Statistical Analysis and Data Mining are the top skills on LinkedIn

CEO Jeff Weiner plans to “develop the world’s first economic graph” with the hopes of “digitally mapping out the global economy.” A goal not far from reach seeing how LinkedIn has an in-depth dataset of company, industry, and individual contact information for more than 500 million members.

In the long-term, this will be a game-changer for marketers and brands in the B2B space.

Becoming a content-first platform

Written content

Did you know that LinkedIn Pulse started as the Pulse app – a class project at Stanford University in 2010? It wasn’t until 2015 that LinkedIn fully integrated Pulse into the platform and established themselves as a content-first social media network.

Before Pulse, LinkedIn didn’t offer users or influencers much in the form of organic content. When they announced that they’d be opening up their Pulse publishing platform to the public in February 2014, it opened the floodgates to a world of content.

Today, Pulse no longer operates as a separate application within LinkedIn. It’s seamlessly integrated into members’ feeds as articles to help enhance the content-first experience.

It’s working, too! More than 100,000 organic articles are published weekly on LinkedIn, many of which are written by top-level executives at brands around the world. Startup Founder, Gretta van Riel, explains just how powerful LinkedIn has been for her content:

Video content

On August 22, 2017, LinkedIn launched what might be their biggest update since Pulse – native LinkedIn video.

Just a few months after launch, the evidence seems to be pointing towards videos performing extremely well on LinkedIn. Videos from the limited release are getting shared 20+ times more than any other content. Our team has been hearing the same sentiment from marketers everywhere.

We also had the wonderful opportunity to speak with the LinkedIn team at MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum this year. LinkedIn plans to roll out the native video feature to brands and businesses in the near future — an update that we’re all excited for!

Our teammate, Paul Thomson, has been experimenting with native LinkedIn video with great success.

Several of his videos are performing two to three times better on LinkedIn than they are on other social media platforms. A great sign for LinkedIn as a video publishing platform.

Becoming a platform for influencers

An interesting trend that we’ve been keeping a close eye on is LinkedIn’s development of their invite-only Influencer Program.

As Daniel Roth, Editor in Chief at LinkedIn writes, “LinkedIn’s Influencers — an invite-only group of some of the top minds in business — have access to briefings, data, and experts that the rest of us can only dream about.”

Offering Influencers an exclusive platform to publish content was a brilliant move on the part of LinkedIn. One, because it offers Influencers a guaranteed way to get their content in front of hundreds of thousands of members. Two, because naturally, Influencers will bring their own audience to the LinkedIn platform by simply sharing their content with their followers. And three, it bolsters LinkedIn’s reputation as a thought-leader in multiple sectors.

The Influencers so far include Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Sallie Krawcheck, James Altucher, and more.

In fact, 36 percent of LinkedIn members now read interesting articles they find in their feed, an increase of 20 percent since 2014. Activating influencers to write great content gives LinkedIn a unique advantage over other social media networks.

Becoming a platform for personal branding & networking

Personal branding

Ultimately, LinkedIn’s biggest value proposition and its reason for growth lie in the ability for members to develop a strong personal brand.

• Seventy-nine percent of professionals say that networking is valuable for career growth
• Sixty-one percent of professionals say that regular online interactions with networks can lead to job opportunities

But what does this mean for B2C and B2B companies?

When brands have employees that feel empowered to build a brand and start side projects outside of their traditional work, it’s a win-win for both the individual and the brand.

Having creative hobbies has been shown to make people more helpful, collaborative, and creative in their job performance.

Networking

I can’t tell you how many relationships I’ve made by simply reaching out to someone on LinkedIn and saying hello.

Many of the guests we’ve featured on The Science of Social Media were first introduced to us via a private LinkedIn message.

Whenever I have a question about social media or marketing, one of the first places I turn to is LinkedIn.

Check out this incredible infographic put together by the folks over at Number Sleuth showing just how important LinkedIn has become for personal brand and networking:

Where we go from here

We predict that 2018 will be an amazing year for LinkedIn – both as a social media platform and a marketing channel for brands and businesses.

It’s a fast-growing network with exciting features being released regularly. These features will continue to open up lots of great opportunities for marketers to connect with highly-targeted audiences in new and engaging ways.

Keep an eye on the growth of written and video content as well as an increased focus on activating influencers by brands within their community.

It’s a great time to be on LinkedIn!

More awesome resources from the show

• The Rise of the New LinkedIn [Infographic] – SocialMediaToday
• Harnessing the Power of LinkedIn to Monetize and Grow Your Business – Buffer Blog
• Once a Running Joke, LinkedIn Is Suddenly a Hot Social Network. Here’s What Changed – AdWeek
• Microsoft officially closes its $26.2B acquisition of LinkedIn – TechCrunch
• Applying to Be a LinkedIn Influencer – LinkedIn
• LinkedIn opens video uploads to all as part of a bigger video push – TechCrunch
• How to Publish on LinkedIn Pulse: A Beginner’s Guide – HubSpot

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter
• Brian on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

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About the show

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 10,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

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Image credit: Unsplash, TechCrunch

Thank The Silent Rise of LinkedIn to 500M Members: What Marketers Need to Know for 2018 [SSM069] for first publishing this post.

I Read More Than 20 Instagram Studies so You Don’t Have to. Here’s What I Found.

At Buffer, we’re big fans of using data and research to guide our social media strategy. So when it came to finding the best Instagram strategy, I turned to social media studies.

I read through more than 20 studies on Instagram marketing from companies like Facebook, Simply Measured, and News Whip. Some analyzed the top Instagram accounts while some even studied tens to hundreds of thousands of Instagram posts.

Here’s what I learned from my look at the research.

8 Actionable Instagram Marketing Tips, Backed by 20+ Studies

The studies contain a ton of great information, and I distilled the key findings into eight actionable tips. Here are the eight tips to guide your Instagram strategy:

1. Instagram’s young audience likes current, creative, and useful content
2. Posting frequency is not as important as posting consistency
3. There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram
4. Businesses cannot ignore Instagram Stories
5. Using both hashtags and location tag drives the most engagement
6. Videos might overtake images as the most engaging type of content
7. User-generated content drives growth and conversions
8. Caption length doesn’t affect engagement

1. Instagram’s young audience likes current, creative, and useful content

According to Statista, an online market research portal, the largest user group on Instagram in the U.S. as of December 2016 was the 25 to 34-year-olds, which accounted for 25.2 percent of U.S. Instagram users. This is followed by the 18 to 24-year-olds, which form 20.6 percent of U.S. Instagram users.

Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan American think tank, also looked into the demographics of Instagram users in the U.S. They also found that “Instagram use is especially high among younger adults” — to a greater extent than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Here are some highlights from Pew Research Center’s study on social media use in the U.S.:

• Fifty-five percent of online adults between the age of 18 and 29 use Instagram — the highest percentage among all age groups
• Thirty-three percent of online adults between the age of 30 and 49 use Instagram — the second highest percentage among the age groups
• A bigger percentage of women (38 percent) than men (26 percent) use Instagram

Instagram strategy takeaway:

If your target audience is between the age of 18 and 49, Instagram could be a great platform to reach your potential customers and engage your existing customers.

To help with your Instagram marketing strategy, Facebook interviewed and surveyed more than 12,000 teens and young adults and offered these recommendations on how to maximize Instagram’s potential for your business:

• Showcase what makes you special: If you can share a perspective that only you can offer, you can more likely connect with the teens and young adults on Instagram.
• Blend in to stand out: Instagram users prefer beautiful visual content and often post such high-quality content themselves. To engage them, you have to create similar high-quality images and videos.
• Inspire the moment: Teens and young adults in the study describe Instagram as current (42 percent), creative (37 percent), and useful (32 percent). Hence, they would expect such content from brands on Instagram.

2. Posting frequency is not as important as posting consistency

A common question we get is:

“How often should I be posting on Instagram?”

We previously found that major brands post once or twice per day to Instagram. And some post as many as 10 times per day without seeing a significant fall in engagement.

Tailwind, a visual marketing tool, analyzed more than 100,000 Instagram posts and offered a plausible explanation for the high posting frequency:

The more often you post on Instagram, the more likes and followers you gain.

They found that accounts posting more than seven times per week get more likes and grow their following faster than accounts that post less than seven posts per week.

Tailwind also analyzed the engagement rates of accounts that increased their posting frequency. They found that when accounts posted more frequently, their engagement rate went up.

Union Metrics, which studied 55 brands on Instagram, also found a similar pattern.

We’ve monitored accounts that post once an hour, all day long, and they see above-average engagement rates on almost all their content, no matter when it occurs in the one-post-an-hour sequence. Later posts do not decline in engagement.

But this doesn’t mean you should start posting several times per day. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. Union Metrics’ whitepaper mentioned two important points:

1. Your audience might not be used to seeing several posts per day from you
2. You might not have the time to create so much content and maintain your content quality

Instagram strategy takeaway:

Posting more frequently is great if your audience likes to see multiple posts per day from you and if you have the resources to constantly produce high-quality posts. Otherwise, posting consistently is more important.

If your followers are not used to seeing many posts per day from you, you could annoy them and cause them to stop following you. If you do not have a team working on your Instagram account, it’s likely challenging to consistently put out high-quality content several times a day. When you run out of content ideas and stop posting consistently, you risk losing followers, which Union Metrics discovered in their study.

Like Union Metrics suggested in their whitepaper, “Stick to a regular posting schedule, but generally don’t post more than a few times a day. One or two great posts a day is better than 10 mediocre posts.”

Buffer for Instagram can help you post consistently to Instagram and measure your Instagram marketing efforts. We would love for you to give it a try and see the difference.

3. There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram

CoSchedule did a great job rounding up several studies on the best times to post on Instagram. Here are some of the studies and their findings:

• Huffington Post: 2 am to 5 pm is the best time to post on Instagram
• MarketingProfs: 1 to 2 pm is best for engagement
• CoSchedule: Tuesday 2 pm could be the best time for driving traffic

Lifewire also looked at a few research and found several best times to post on Instagram. SumAll also compiled findings from a few sources (Visual.ly, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Today) and suggested this: 5 to 6 pm on weekdays and 8 pm on Mondays with a sweet spot at 6 pm.

All the suggestions likely worked well for some businesses but certainly not all. This variety in “best” posting times points me to one conclusion.

There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

If there isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram, when should you post on Instagram? How do you make sense of these research?

Here’s my take: These research are great for you to form hypotheses of your best posting time. For example, like Lifewire suggested, “Around the lunch hour is when people get a break to do what they want; that often includes checking social media.” What you could do is to test posting around the lunch hour and outside of the lunch hour. Which posts did better?

You can also use tools like Iconosquare and Buffer to help you find your best time to post on Instagram by using your own Instagram data. Here’s how Iconosquare’s best time to post feature looks like:

4. Businesses cannot ignore Instagram Stories

Here are two interesting Instagram Stories statistics reported on Techcrunch:

• Instagram Stories generated, on average, 35 percent more views for brands than Snapchat Stories, according to the mobile video platform, dubdub.
• One in five Instagram Stories posted by businesses receives a direct message reply.

When Iconosquare wanted to study the effect of Instagram Stories on the engagement of Instagram posts, they asked more than 1,200 Instagram users, “Since the arrival of Stories, what do you spend most of your time on Instagram doing?”. They found that “in only 3 weeks, almost one-quarter of the Instagram users we surveyed have seemingly ditched their usual Instagram activity in favour of watching Stories.”

The shift in attention led to a fall in engagement on Instagram posts. When Iconosquare looked at the engagement rate of 60 top brands before and after Instagram Stories was launched, they discovered that engagement rate fell after Instagram Stories was launched. This finding was confirmed by several readers of the Iconosquare blog.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

A way to counter the drop in engagement rate is to follow the change in the behavior of Instagram users: to post Instagram Stories.

Klear, an influencer marketing platform, studied 149 top brands in eight industries to see how they have been using Instagram Stories. They found that 45 percent of the brands in their study are using Instagram Stories at least once per week. Some of the most active brands on Instagram Stories include McDonald’s, IBM, and Forever 21.

If you are not sure what to post in your Instagram Stories, Klear provided a breakdown of the ways brands in different industries have been using Instagram Stories:

For example, posting merchandise promotions was the most-common use of Instagram Stories in the fashion industry. I think it’s safe to assume that brands would post more of what’s working for them so the most-common use of Instagram Stories is likely also the best use of Instagram Stories for that industry.

Here are 10 free easy-to-edit Instagram Stories templates to help you get started.

5. Using both hashtags and location tag drives the most engagement

Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook, hashtags are a norm on Instagram. When studying the Instagram accounts of the top 100 global brands in 2014, Simply Measured found that 88 percent of their posts include at least one hashtag.

There’s a good reason for this. Using hashtags and location tag helps people discover your Instagram posts.

In the same study, Simply Measured found that posts with at least one hashtag generated an average of 13 percent more engagement while posts with a location tag received an average of 29 percent more engagement. This was confirmed by their 2015 study where they found that posts with hashtags and a location tag received the highest average engagement.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

If you want to increase your Instagram reach and engagement, use hashtags and location tag if possible.

After studying more than 65,000 social media posts, TrackMaven found that nine hashtags seem to be the optimal amount for getting the maximum engagement.

But you want to be mindful of not overusing hashtags. According to Iconosquare, overusing hashtags can lead to a shadowban on your posts where your posts don’t show up under the hashtags they’ve used. This will reduce the discoverability and reach of your posts and, in turn, reduce the engagement level.

6. Videos might overtake images as the best content type

On Facebook, it’s clear that videos have overtaken images as the best content type. But on Instagram, it’s still unclear.

According to studies by News Whip, L2, and Simply Measured, the average engagement of images are still higher than the average engagement of videos.

While it might seem that images are still the best content type on Instagram, there are some observations by News Whip that suggest videos might become the best content type soon.

• Top publishers, on average, get more likes on their images but more comments on their videos. (L2 found a similar trend.)
• The average engagement on videos is growing faster than the average engagement on images (53 percent increase vs 46 percent increase).
• Top publishers are posting more videos than before — up to 93 percent of their monthly posts.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

Whether videos will outperform images on Instagram will depend on each brand’s followers. The best you can do is to experiment with videos and compare their performance with your image posts. Your data will tell you which content type your followers like more.

When News Whip studied the top 20 publishers that post the most engaging Instagram videos, they found that the average video length is 30 seconds. This can be a great starting point when you are creating your videos. Here are the other tips that News Whip shared:

1. Use relatable or pop culture memes relevant to your audience
2. Show your viewers something they wouldn’t see every day
3. Capture action-packed feats, stunts, or sports
4. Offer inside peeks to celebrities or athletes
5. Play around with appetizing collages or animations
6. Focus on heartwarming stories

If you plan to create more videos, here are a few tools to help you.

7. User-generated content drives growth and conversions

As an anecdote, we grew our Instagram account by 540 percent in a year using user-generated content.

But let’s look at the data, too. L2 studied 250 brands in nine industries and discovered the wonderful impact of user-generated content on Instagram. Consumers who see a user-generated photo have a 4.5 percent higher chance of converting into a customer. This increases to 9.6 percent when the consumers interacted with the photo.

Furthermore, user-generated photos increase the likelihood to purchase by several times across various categories of goods — up to 6.4 times for apparels.

Even though it’s a study on (25 million user-generated) Facebook posts, Mavrck found that “user-generated content featuring a brand drove 6.9x higher engagement than brand-generated content“.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

Whether you want to increase your Instagram following, engagement, or conversion rates, user-generated content is a great strategy to experiment with. Many big brands like REI, Ben & Jerry’s and GoPro curate the best photos from their customers and post them on their own Instagram account.

To help you get started, here’s our guide to creating a user-generated content campaign.

8. Caption length doesn’t affect engagement

The general recommendation for the Instagram caption is to keep it short. For example, Sprout Social suggests that 138 to 150 characters are the best for maximizing engagement.

I believe there’s a good reason for the recommendation: Instagram only shows the first three lines of a caption and hides the rest behind a “more” button.

Interestingly, Simply Measured found that while the average caption by the top 100 global brands is 138 characters long (including hashtags), “there is no statistically significant correlation between caption length and engagement”.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

I personally believe that there isn’t an ideal length for a caption. A caption should be as long (or as short) as it needs to be to convey your message. It could be an emoji or a 2,000-character paragraph.

That said, if you want your entire caption to be displayed on the Instagram feed, Instagram recommends keeping your caption to 125 characters or fewer. HubSpot follows that with a great advice:

For that reason, it’s advised to limit captions to 125 characters. However, don’t leave out important information just for the sake of keeping your entire caption visible. Instead, frontload it with crucial details and calls-to-action, leaving any hashtags, @mentions, or extraneous information for the end.

What’s your favorite Instagram study?

Social media marketing is a very individual, specific endeavor. What might work for others might not always work for you. Instead of taking the findings of these studies as the whole truth, I prefer to see them as great starting points for my own social media experiments: Use them to form hypotheses, test various ideas, analyze the results, and iterate.

What hypotheses will you form with these eight tips?

• Instagram’s young audience likes current, creative, and useful content
• Posting frequency is not as important as posting consistency
• There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram
• Businesses cannot ignore Instagram Stories
• Using both hashtags and location tag drives the most engagement
• Videos might overtake images as the best content type
• User-generated content drives growth and conversions
• Caption length doesn’t affect engagement

What’s your favorite Instagram study from this blog post? Do the findings match your experiences? 

You might also enjoy these Instagram marketing resources:

  

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Image credit: Unsplash

Thank I Read More Than 20 Instagram Studies so You Don’t Have to. Here’s What I Found. for first publishing this post.

A Simple 3-Step Approach to Increasing Conversions and ROI with Social Media Advertising

There’s so much to learn with social media advertising that it’s difficult to know exactly where to start.

For example, audience targeting, budgeting, A/B testing, pixel tracking, writing, designing, and analyzing all need to be taken into account if you want to see positive ROI from social media advertising.

There’s time and resources to consider as well.

Even incredibly talented social media managers that oversee multi-million dollar advertising budgets understand that it takes hundreds of experiments (and failures) to master the art of social media ads.

After speaking with top brands and marketers from around the globe, we’ve discovered a simple 3-step approach to successful social media advertising. This approach will help you bring all the various elements of advertising together in perfect harmony and how to drive more ROI from your ad spend.

Let’s dive in!

We’re super excited to bring you our brand new Skillshare class on social media advertising! This 50-minute, straightforward class will help you create a solid foundation for your brand or business on social media.

Bonus: We’re offering our community members two free months of Skillshare here (allowing you to access our class for free starting today!): skl.sh/buffer_advertising

A 3-step approach to social media advertising

Over the years, we’ve spent countless hours experimenting with various social media advertising strategies.

Whilst research each of these experiments, we found that there was a ton of awesome advice on tactics for each individual channel, but what we were missing was an overall strategic approach or “way of thinking” about social media advertising.

Instead of focusing on individual tactics and channels that frequently change, we wanted to focus on a blueprint that could be applied to any business or brand, no matter the industry or product. And that’s what I’d love to share with you below.

That social media advertising blueprint is broken up into three distinct stages:

• Awareness (TOFU)
• Consideration (MOFU)
• Conversion (BOFU)

Unless you have a product that’s flying off the shelf or a viral marketing campaign, you’ll often need all three stages (awareness, consideration, and conversion) working in tandem to attract and acquire new customers.

Why all three stages are important

One of the things I hear most from businesses is that they’re having trouble finding success with social media advertising, particularly Facebook, in trying to sell their product or services.

Whenever we get that comment, one of the first questions we ask those businesses is: “Do you have any campaigns set up that aren’t simply trying to sell, but to generate awareness?”

More often than not the answer is “no.”

It can be quite a challenge to immediately begin selling your product through social media advertising. As a marketer, you have to be willing to build relationships with potential customers first before you ask for the purchase.

That’s where this idea of awareness, consideration, and conversions come into play.

Pros and cons of social media advertising

Pros:

• Campaigns are easy to track
• You can begin to drive traffic and conversions immediately (depending on your knowledge of your customers)
• You’ll have a complete picture of the ROI on each campaign
• Tons of targeting options, including: age, likes, interests, income bracket, location, and other demographics
• Retargeting options for people who have interacted with your content or visited your website
• Relative to other advertising mediums, social media can be extremely affordable (which we all love)

Cons:

• Depending on your target market, a majority of the audience may be irrelevant – Leading to “wasted” ad spend
• Easy to create ads and leave them without ever checking on performance which can also lead to costliness
• Social media advertising requires a lot of time and attention in order to maximize results
• Run the risk of what marketers call ad fatigue. Potential customers might be shown an ad too early or too often and be turned off
• Larger investment upfront while you figure out a good combination of content, visuals, and copy

Here’s a quick video preview on the importance of social media advertising from our new Skillshare class:

Introduction to Social Media Advertising | Learn with Buffer

An Online Skillshare Class by Brian Peters

Social Media Advertising: Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, people are either completely unfamiliar with your brand or are unaware that they have a pain point that needs to be solved.

Let’s use Nike as an example, many people have heard of Nike (and they probably even own a pair of Nike shoes or a piece of gear!)

If you’re a direct, somewhat unknown competitor of Nike, the awareness stage is a critical place to start with social media advertising. Reason being, Nike has a strong hold on the market in terms of brand awareness and affinity. People may not know that your shoes and/or gear is more competitively priced or better quality than Nike.

Awareness & organic content

One great strategy for increasing brand awareness is to focus on organic social media posting and amplifying your top performing content.

One of the biggest opportunities for so many brands with limited time and resources is to simply boost top performing posts from their page. Not only is this the most inexpensive form of social media advertising, but it also provides brands with a way to reach a new customer segment that they might not have been able to with traditional ads.

Organic social media content is a powerful catalyst in increasing word-of-mouth marketing. People are much less likely to share an advertisement that feels like an advertisement with their friends and family.

For example, we boosted a recent post on Facebook that highlighted a photo from one of our Buffer Community members. With just $100 dollars, these are the results we received:

We spend about 70% of our overall advertising budget on simply amplifying or “boosting” top performing content. Some of these boosted posts have reached up to 750,000 people with one or two hundred dollars. Where else can you reach 750,000 people for a few hundred bucks? It’s incredible!

Awareness & audience targeting

What I love most about TOFU social media advertising is that you can boost posts to specific, targeted audiences.

With Facebook, for example, you don’t have to use the “boost post” button that you see next to your posts in the feed. Instead, as a Page manager, you can use Facebook Ads Manager to create a campaign (such as traffic, engagement, or video views) to create a custom audience.

Then, once you’ve created a custom, highly-relevant audience, simply select the “use existing post” option.

This gives you total control over budget, goals, audience, and allows you to run boosted posts alongside all of your other campaigns so that you can compare results.

Boosted posts aren’t the only option for marketers in the awareness stage of social media advertising. You can advertise with fun articles, videos, graphics, memes, GIFs – anything that you know an audience will respond to and (ideally) share with their followers.

The main focus in the awareness stage is to create and share content that’s super-high-up in the funnel (TOFU). This content shouldn’t necessarily ask for a sale or be a product promotion. It should simply look to provide fun, useful, or entertaining content to an audience who is unaware of your brand or unaware that they have a pain point.

Going back to our Nike example, awareness-type content might be a video series on selecting the proper shoes for all types of activities, or it might be a complete comparison guide on the latest shoe fashion.

Anything that catches someone’s eye! This will help set your business up for the next stage, which is consideration.

Social Media Advertising: Consideration Stage

The second part of our 3-step approach is the consideration stage.

Consideration and conversions are what we consumers typically think about when they hear the word “advertising.”

Consideration, in particular, is the stage where people are either familiar with your product or recognize that they have a pain point and are researching options.

Pixel targeting

It’s in the consideration stage where honing in on proper targeting and retargeting can become a huge factor in the overall success of your ads. Targeting the correct audience can lead to higher conversions and lower costs.

We recommend having the basic Facebook Pixel set up on your website. You can find your unique pixel in Facebook Ads Manager under “Pixels.”

Installing the Pixel will allow you to track the behavior of users on your website and also target them with Facebook Ads in the future based on specific actions. It’s magical!

Here’s a what is will look like on Facebook after you’ve successfully installed your Pixel:

Keep in mind that many social media networks offer snippets of code that you can place on your website in order to fully track the success of your ads.

Other targeting options

If you don’t have a ton of website traffic at the moment, that’s OK! There are other great ways to target valuable audiences for your business on Facebook.

Lookalike Audiences

One of my favorite ways is the Lookalike custom audience option. Using Facebook’s sophisticated algorithm you can create a custom Lookalike audience that target’s users who are most likely to engage or purchase from your brand.

There are two great ways to go about creating a Lookalike audience.

One, you can upload an email list of your most valuable customers – ideally customers that have a high lifetime value (LTV), or customers you know that make repeated purchases. That gives Facebook a great place to start in understanding who to target.

Two, you can create a Lookalike audience based on your own Facebook Page audience. In other words, an audience that’s closely related to the people who currently like and engage with your page.

We’ve seen huge success with Lookalike audiences on Buffer’s Facebook Page.

Recently, we experimented with uploading a Mailchimp list of Buffer for Business and Awesome users to Facebook and created a Lookalike audience from there. Campaigns using this custom audience have resulted in a 30% lower CPC and a 11% higher conversion rate than our standard demographic-based audience.

Demographic-based audiences

Speaking of demographics, that’s the final (but still great) way to target users. You can target users based on age, location, mobile device, interests, income, job title, and tons more.

Where we’ve seen the most success is targeting users who like pages similar to ours. We might target users if they’ve liked pages such as Hootsuite, Jay Baer, Mari Smith, Social Media Examiner, Socialbakers, and other similar brands to Buffer.

How to approach the consideration stage

To quickly review, the consideration stage is where your customers are either aware of your brand or aware that they have a pain point that they’d like to solve. So it’s important to articulate your ads in such a way that speak to customers at this stage of their journey.

Similar to the awareness stage, people in the consideration stage still need a bit of guidance or time before making a purchase. In speaking to some big brands and people who specialize in Facebook Ads, successful content in this stage depends a lot on the value and perceived value that you’re providing.

Some great questions to ask here are:

• What specifically are you providing users that is different than they are used to seeing, hearing, reading, and experiencing in on social media or in their industry?
• Is what you’re advertising with so compelling that they had to click?

For example, let’s say your business is a marketing agency and you want to get more qualified prospects into your sales funnel. You started in the awareness stage and boosted one of your top performing posts on Facebook which drove some traffic to your website.

Awesome! Now what?

If you have Facebook Pixels set up on your website, you can create a Custom Audience based on traffic to that specific page and retarget those users with an add for another similar piece of content. Or you can target them with an invitation to an upcoming webinar on marketing strategy. Or, a free download of an ebook that you created on starting a business.

Since that audience already interacted with your content on Facebook and has now visited your website, you’ll have a much higher chance of getting them to sign up for something in the future and might even get their email address while you’re at it!

Here’s an example of a piece of consideration (MOFU) content we ran with HubSpot last year:

One more example of targeting in the consideration stage!

First, we created a TOFU video that was meant to purely drive views and engagement.

After posting the video organically to Facebook, we boosted it for extra views. After about 3 or 4 days the views climbed up into the thirty-thousand range.

We then created a Custom Audience based on people who watched more than 10 seconds of this video we created (making them a highly-engaged user). Within that custom audience, we excluded anyone who had visited Buffer.com or blog.buffer.com in the last 60 days.

Finally, we targeted a top performing and related blog post to this audience to drive traffic to our website.

This ad has driven more than 3,500 visits to our blog for less than $0.15 per click. All of which haven’t been to any of our pages within the last 60 days!

Which leaves us with one last stage, the money maker, conversions.

Social Media Advertising: Conversion Stage

The conversion stage is one of the trickiest stages to master, but those that get the hang of it can drive big results for their business.

Success in the conversion stage comes down to three critical components:

1. The quality of your targeting
2. The quality of your ads
3. The ability to track results.

It’s also worth noting that great conversion-focused ads almost always contain an irresistible offer.

For many companies, this might be a discount on a product, a free-trial, a coupon, a buy-one-get-one-free offer, or even the standard product in full price depending on the industry.

Along with this is the importance of being able to track results of your conversion ads through tools like the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, a product like AdRoll, or even maybe your brand’s CRM.

Understanding which campaigns are driving conversions, which campaigns are resulting in higher lifetime value customers, and which campaigns are losing money is super important in helping you to double down on what’s working and drop or iterate on what’s not.

Here’a a great graphic from our recent interview with Ian Cleary on creating a sales funnel that converts:

It’s important to note here that the word “conversion” doesn’t necessarily have to mean purchases or sales. A conversion can mean a variety of different things to different businesses.

You might find that a user who signs up for your webinar is much more valuable then someone who signs up for a free trial.

In that case, you’ll probably find it valuable to spend a majority of your ad dollars on webinar conversions, which you can track with a simple landing page and thank you page.

Speaking of budgeting, here’s a sneak peek at “Budgeting” from our new Skillshare class!

Introduction to Social Media Advertising | Learn with Buffer

An Online Skillshare Class by Brian Peters

The conversion stage is all about knowing how to track valuable pieces of content in every part of the customer journey.

Over to you!

Social media advertising can be a daunting venture for many businesses and marketers. It’s what prevented us ay Buffer from experimenting with ads for a long time.

Thinking of advertising in terms of the three different stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion, you’ll be well-ahead of 90% of the social media advertising marketers out there.

You can begin with the basics such as boosting posts to help build an audience that you can eventually target down the line. Or, you can jump right into the bottom of the funnel if you have a piece of content that you think would work particularly well.

We encourage you to get out there and try it for yourself!

We’re super excited to bring you our brand new Skillshare class on social media advertising! This 50-minute, straightforward class will help you create a solid foundation for your brand or business on social media.

Thank A Simple 3-Step Approach to Increasing Conversions and ROI with Social Media Advertising for first publishing this post.