While high-quality organic social media content is valuable for building your brand and communicating on behalf of your organization, paid social media with a well-crafted targeting strategy will ensure that content reaches the right people. Even with a small budget, you can significantly amplify your posts within an existing audience or reach new viewers.
Facebook and Instagram
Most people allocate a significant portion of their social media advertising dollars to Facebook and Instagram, which can be accessed through Facebook’s Ad Manager. This is a logical decision because it is the largest social media platform in the world, and much has been written about changes to its algorithms that inhibit the reach of organic content from Facebook Pages. It is an excellent advertising platform for the myriad targeting options it offers advertisers and the broad audiences it allows advertisers to reach.
Facebook also helps advertisers create “lookalike” audiences. Once you have identified a “source audience” from a customer list matched with Facebook users, or people who presently follow your Facebook page, Facebook can create an audience for an ad campaign that is similar to the source audience, tailor it by size and geography (by country), and begin delivering your ad campaign to that audience of people who have a similar profile to those you know have an interest in your product or service.
X
X may not offer the nuanced targeting options available on Facebook, but a few mechanisms in X’s advertising platform make it incredibly useful.
- Keyword advertising: Interest and topic targeting on X is much less nuanced than on Facebook. However, X makes up for that by offering keyword targeting, reaching people who have used a specific word or hashtag in their post, or people who have interacted with posts containing those words in the last seven days. For example, downtown Jacksonville’s Business Improvement District has made the hashtag #dtjax popular. If you are an advertiser interested in reaching people interested in downtown Jacksonville because they live or work there, select “dtjax” as your keyword.
- Follower lookalikes: This option lets you target people with interests similar to those of another account’s followers. You may wish to target competitors, brands that complement yours, or media and news outlets that report on your industry, to name just a few examples.
- Events: X maintains a list of prominent upcoming events that you can select from when building your advertising campaign, reaching audiences interested in events related to your campaign. Review X’s 2025 Marketing Calendar here.
LinkedIn bills itself as “the largest global community of professionals,” and for that reason, it is by far the strongest B2B advertising option on social media.
It allows you to target audiences based on individual characteristics—such as alma maters, fields of study, job titles, functions, seniority, and skills—as well as by company characteristics including name, industry, size, and connections.
LinkedIn also offers two ad formats unmatched by the other platforms listed here.
- Dynamic ads are tailored to your advertising campaign’s objectives while gleaning data from individual profiles to create customized ads for each viewer.
- Sponsored messages place tailored content in LinkedIn inboxes along with other organic messages.
One final benefit is their website tag, a simple piece of code that can be installed in any content management system. This tool helps you track which companies are visiting your website, identify competitors, and follow up with potential clients. You can also retarget these visitors with subsequent advertising campaigns.
Contact Tucker/Hall to discuss how a well-designed social media advertising plan could benefit your company or organization.
