Social Media Marketing 2022: Costs, Trends, Platforms, And Everything In Between

Social media advertising can launch your business into the stratosphere, but mastering your social media presence isn’t an overnight, passive event. You have to effectively engage your audience on the right social media platforms. From Facebook to Twitter, from LinkedIn to Pinterest, finding the right digital advertising board for your company is essential to establishing a broader reach.

What kind of costs will you incur? Which platform(s) will work best for you? How can you get creative with your marketing across platforms? Let’s go through everything you need to know about social media marketing for success in 2022.

Social Media Advertising

Whether you’re engaged in real estate marketing or otherwise, you should consider using paid social media advertising to promote your business. Doing this is sometimes referred to as ‘paid social’. This format spans platforms and utilizes everything from photos to brief videos.

Social media ads are often branded and more visual than a basic ad. Unlike a paid search in which you target specific terms and keywords, on social media, you target interests, audiences, and behaviors. Because of how they are designed, they are sometimes difficult to pinpoint as ads.

What are the benefits?

There are multiple reasons why you should advertise on social media. Benefits include:

  • Being non-disruptive: Social media ads are hard to distinguish from organic content and therefore don’t interrupt the flow of someone’s feed.
  • Cost-effective: PPC yields 200% ROI on average and is more cost-effective for targeting the competition’s audience via search.
  • Targeting: Granular targeting helps you reach users who share detailed info about themselves.
  • Brand awareness: Visual ads allow you to utilize creativity and branding.
  • Formats: Many media types and formats are supported.
  • Engagement: Users can like, share, and comment on social media ads, creating genuine engagement.

Which social media advertising platforms are the most popular?

The social media ad market is absolutely massive. In fact, social media ads are the fourth biggest method of brand discovery; it is also the second most popular channel for online brand research.

Also, in 2021 alone, social media ads generated $153 billion, making it the biggest social media market only second to digital ads. Google holds sway over 28.6% of global digital ad spending, although Meta (Facebook) slides in at a close second, at 23.7%.

How do social media ads work?

Although search ads work based on keyword targeting, social ads revolve around audience targeting. Regardless of which platform you’re on, that platform has its own formats, features, and settings.

They also have a few things in common. Social media ads are an auction-style type of PPC. The first step in making a campaign is to create an objective. They all center around reach and awareness, engagement and leads, sales and conversions, targeting (based on interests, demographics, and behaviors), and account structure (which lets you organize ads into groups before organizing those groups into campaigns).

How much does it cost to run ads on social media?

There are quite a few factors that go into ad costs on social media. Those factors include your budget, campaign objective, bidding strategy, industry, and campaign optimization. With social media advertising costs, you’ll see more particular costs, such as cost per click, cost per 1000 impressions, cost per conversion/action/lead, cost per video view, cost per engagement, cost per app install, and cost per follower.

What you’ll pay is highly dependent on the industry but also the campaign type.

Start Social Media Advertising

How should you start your social media advertising? Here are the steps you might want to take for getting a jump on it.

Identify and Understand Your Audience

The first – and perhaps most important – step is to identify and understand your target audience. Your current customer data comes in handy here, and you can do some further market research and check into analytics from your existing platforms to see who is seeing you.

You can ask your customers questions like:

  • How did you learn about our company?
  • Is there any reason you might hesitate to choose us?
  • What do you like about our services/products?

Choose Your Channel

While a multi-channel marketing approach is crucial, you need to establish yourself on one core platform before you go wider. The best channel for you to start on depends on your audience. That being said, for most, Facebook is the optimal place to start.

Generate General Goals

What is it that you wish to achieve using social ads? It can be difficult to identify specific parameters until you get started, but you can get a generalized idea of which campaign objective to kick off with based on your main goal.

Find Out Your Benchmark Data

Remember, how much you’ll pay depends on your audience, industry, and optimization strategy. However, it is important to get a general idea of your reference point so you start off with a reasonable expectation for your budgeting boundaries.

Utilize Resources

There are many free resources available online for learning how to maximize your reach on social media and how to target your ads. There are social media courses you can take, and some of them cost nothing but your time.

Simply Start

After you’ve taken some time to learn about social media marketing, just get started. Be creative and have fun with your ads. The sooner you start, the more quickly you can start gathering helpful data.

Social Media Advertising Tips

The best approach will vary by platform. However, there are some tips that cover all platforms. Here are some things you can do:

Rely On Organic Data

If you already have an organic social strategy, utilize that data for your social media ads. You’ll gain insight over time, seeing which posts perform best and what your audience insights are like.

Utilize User-generated Content

Pay attention to your best-performing user-generated content while you create your ads. These mix reviews with a relatability factor, leading to ROI-generating ads.

Be Mobile-y Minded

Most social media platforms are mobile-based, so keep your mind on being mobile while you distribute your ads. If your audience is full of young urban professionals, run your ad during a time in which they’ll see it from their desktop.

Use the A/B Test

Try out several versions of your ads to see which one performs best. A/B testing lets you alter one variable, such as the image or image style. Use the one that is the best received.

Diversify Your Campaign Types

Every paid social platform gives you multiple objectives for your campaign because each business has unique goals and because, in your funnel, you’ll have unique goals. You can generate leads with a top-of-funnel offer for your first campaign but retarget website visitors with bottom-funnel content in the next. Create several campaigns and utilize these varied objectives to make a full-funnel approach to truly get the most out of every platform you use.

Pair Your Social Ads and Search

Find a way to use your search and social ads together after you’ve got a hold of your strategy. Oh, and don’t forget to inject your own sense of creativity into it!

Platform Pros & Cons

Facebook

Facebook has an advertising audience of 2.11 billion people with major representation for the 25-34-year-old demographic and 65+. There is a low average cost per click of $0.97. However, setting an ad account up can be incredibly difficult.

Instagram

Instagram caters to the 18-34 year range, and the average cost per click for Instagram ads is $3.56. Engagement is higher than on Facebook, and it works well for many eCommerce businesses.

Twitter

Twitter has about 436.4 million users, and its average cost per click of $0.38 is the lowest of any platform. Twitter’s audience tends to be more affluent, and they spend more time viewing ads on Twitter than on other platforms. However, the setup process and tracking on Twitter can be tricky.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is indeed expensive to advertise on with its average CPC being 4-5 times more than Facebook’s. It also doesn’t have certain features that other platforms possess. However, you can use Bing to target your LinkedIn audience and get a lot of audience insights.

Some Food For Thought

You can now get started with your social media marketing strategy. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you need to give your ads time to find their audience. Don’t give up if your engagement is low at the start. Make tweaks as you go and perfect your brand through your ads.