It’s fairly safe to say that social media has changed our lives. Networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat have opened up new ways to communicate and share our passions and daily lives. As a result, they have attracted hundreds of millions of active users. The online advertising research company eMarketer estimated that 593.7 million people worldwide used Instagram at least once a month in 2017.

All of these networks have benefited from the fact that consumers eagerly share their interests across these networks, generating a substantial amount of data about these consumers that advertisers can use to deliver targeted ad messages. This has led to the massive popularity of social advertising as a way to reach very targeted audiences – the same eMarketer report estimates Instagram sold $4.10 billion in advertising in 2017.

Many businesses are aware that social media gives them an opportunity to interact with their customers by sharing content, news and special discounts to those who “follow” the company’s pages. But many do not know that they can amplify their voice across these networks through the use of paid advertising, which can put them in front of both their existing customers and new prospects.

Facebook allows advertisers to set their goals, determine the audience targets that they want to reach, set budgets and then run campaigns across the network (here is an overview of the basics). Advertisers can get very creative with their targeting. They can pursue consumers who recently visited their site or looked at items at online retailers. They can target completely new audiences who have the same characteristics of customers (in other words, those who are “likely” to be customers). Many of the same parameters and strategies can be applied to Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

The best part is that these opportunities are available to advertisers of all sizes and advertisers don’t have to approach social advertising as a do-it-yourself endeavor. Ad agencies, local media companies and other ad services providers, including Sound Publishing, can help advertisers take advantage of social advertising to grow their business. In fact, here at Sound all we need is your desired audience and what you’d like your campaign to do (such as promote the launch of a new store or bring new visitors to your website), and we will handle the rest, including creative, campaign set up, and reporting.