Social media is one of the most effective communication and advertising channels. Marketers are doing their best to reach the right audience with highly targeted ads on social media, but it’s usually not that easy!

Here is a full guide by Udacity to determine which platform is right for your message and your audience. This Social Media Advertising guide covers 6 major social media channels; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and LinkedIn.

DMND said that this guide is a short excerpt from the Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree program – a comprehensive and highly interactive course that teaches you all you need to know to become a Digital Marketer.

Summary of the Social Media Advertising Guide:

Facebook:

For Digital Marketers, Facebook is one of the most attractive online platforms. Facebook has powerful audience selection tools to utilize its rich user data to target very specific audiences.

Otherwise, on Facebook people are looking to see what’s up and want to get new inputs but they don’t know what that’s going to be. Advertisers face a big challenge in creating interesting content as Facebook ads usually appear to people who aren’t necessarily searching for your product and who see your ad when it passes through their news stream. See the difference between Facebook ads and Google Adwords here

The guide shows with examples what is the targeting options on PCs and Mobile devices and how you can combine them to build a specific audience that has the most of your customers criteria.

Successful Case Study Ad on Facebook

Instagram:

For Digital Marketers, Instagram is a fantastic channel to tell a company’s story in a visual and engaging way.

The Social Media Advertising Guide shows with examples what is the targeting options on Instagram which is very similar to Facebook targeting options. You can combine them to build a specific audience.

Twitter:

Twitter is known as the “SMS of the internet”. For Digital Marketers, Twitter offers various ad types with different campaign objectives, from increasing website visits and sales to creating a bigger following for a company’s Twitter account.

Case Study: L’Oréal Paris Australia wanted to drive traffic and engagement from exclusive TV content around red carpet events, using Twitter. To do this, the brand used Promoted Tweets, a Promoted Trend and a Twitter Amplify campaign that directed users to L’Oréal’s Get the Look Website.

Pinterest:

The Pinterest CEO calls the platform “Catalogue of Ideas”. Some industries, especially in fashion, art or interior design space, are using Pinterest to promote their products and services.

Pinterest offers an advanced system to target your company’s audience. The guide explains how to advertise on Pinterest starting from creating a business account until the specific details of how to combine the targeting options to reach the right audience.

Snapchat:

• Snapchat now has more than 200 M monthly active users, many of them are Millennials.
• The majority of advertising offerings is currently only available to bigger advertisers with considerable budgets.

Related Guide: How to Create Your Own Snapchat Geofilter

LinkedIn:

• The largest professional social network in the world with more than 460 M registered accounts and about 106 M users visit the site at least once a month.
• Advertisers can use LinkedIn to promote employees, jobs, and stories, and to advertise products and services that are of interest to a professional audience.

Number of Pages:

• 28 Pages

Pricing:

• Free