While Facebook offers the dominant market share and greatest variety of ad units, the other social platforms have rolled out compelling opportunities you can’t afford to ignore. If you leverage multiple platforms for their unique strengths, you can build a comprehensive social media marketing plan that reaches the widest possible audience, with the fullest spectrum of media types.
You’ll echo and reinforce your message across multiple social networks, and by dropping remarketing cookies, you’ll extend your reach 360 degrees. Here’s a snapshot of how the other platforms can round out your Facebook ad presence and work in concert:
If you’re a publisher, blogger, or thought leader, use promoted tweets, trends, or accounts to help build a “subscriber base.” If you’re a retailer, amplify your news, campaigns, and offers from other channels with a timely and efficient promoted newsfeed.
YouTube
With pre-roll ads and featured videos, bring to life the sights and sounds of active, visual products and services. As a bonus, amass a remarketing cookie pool of qualified leads, to be shown banner ads across the Google Display Network.
Google+
The Google+ ad play is not advertising on the social network, but bringing social proof into your Google AdWords paid search and online advertising program. It can be powerful.
Interest-Targeting on Twitter
The most compelling change at Twitter is the enhanced interest-targeting, which brings it up to par with Facebook or even leapfrogs its rival. With interest-targeting, Twitter advertisers select from a list of 375 topics and subtopics. Twitter identifies a user’s interests algorithmically, by analyzing the contents of his or her tweets and retweets and the handles the user follows.
“For broader reach, you can target more than 350 interest categories, ranging from education to home and garden to investing to soccer,” writes Kevin Weil, Twitter’s director of product management, on the company’s blog. “If you were promoting a new animated film about dogs, you could select animation (under movies and television), cartoons (under hobbies and interests), and dogs (under pets).
YouTube
YouTube, the second most visited of all social media websites, offers a wealth of powerful new advertising options, including integration across the advertising network of its parent company, Google.
Promoted Videos are ordinary YouTube videos, of any length, uploaded to your YouTube account. These videos can appear as relevant search results (driven by keywords, as on the AdWords platform) or alongside contextually related video content on YouTube, along the top and right-hand side of the page.
Merchants like Vera Bradley and Pottery Barn Teen have run back-to-school promotions on YouTube, creating themed channels and buying TrueView ads targeted to backto-school searches and related content.
Summary
While no other social platform offers quite the advertising muscle of Facebook, it’s important to recognize the unique benefits of the other networks. Twitter offers reach, simplicity, and value for the dollar, and it should be part of the toolkit for any news, culture, information, or media-oriented business.
YouTube is perfect for visual markets, and it has an unmatched ability to build a cookie pool for display advertising across the broader Internet. Google+ is all about boosting the impact of your Google AdWords program.
