Social advertising

Why one size does not fit all and how you should approach each.

PAGE 2 | Social Advertising Part 1: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Executive summary ..................................................................................................4

Social ad network summary ........................................................................................... 5

Facebook ...................................................................................................................... 7

Learnings ........................................................................................................................................7

Users want to stay in the network where possible ..................................................... 7

Facebook wants you to stay in its network ................................................................. 7

Social ads perform better ............................................................................................... 8

Other best practices for Facebook advertising ...............................................................9

Images and branding ....................................................................................................... 9

Title copy .......................................................................................................................... 9

Body copy ....................................................................................................................... 10

Calls-to-action ................................................................................................................ 10

Targeting .......................................................................................................................... 11

CPC vs CPM ...................................................................................................................... 11

Sponsored Stories: your opportunity for brand advocacy ........................................ 12

Sponsored Stories in the News Feed ...........................................................................12

Sponsored Stories in mobile .........................................................................................13

The Wildfire Storyteller application ........................................................................... 14

Managing your advertising mix ................................................................................... 14

Twitter ...........................................................................................................................15

Logistics ........................................................................................................................................ 15

Promoted Accounts ........................................................................................................15

Promoted Tweets ............................................................................................................16

Placement in Search .......................................................................................................16


Placement in the Timeline .............................................................................................17

Promoted Trends ............................................................................................................17

Best practices for Twitter advertising ............................................................................... 18

Keep content fresh and engaging ................................................................................18

Geography .......................................................................................................................18

Mobile ...............................................................................................................................18

LinkedIn ........................................................................................................................19

Logistics.................................................................................................................................... 19

Best practices for LinkedIn ddvertising ...........................................................................20

Imagery and branding ...................................................................................................20

Linking your title and copy to your audience ............................................................20

Strong calls-to-action ...................................................................................................20

Running promotions to drive ad efficacy ...................................................................21

Weekly trends when timing your campaigns .............................................................21

Targeting ......................................................................................................................... 22

Optimization ................................................................................................................... 22


What you need to know before you jump into the details

As a marketer, you have likely dipped your toes into “social”

waters, and developed a branded presence and audience.

But have you mastered the art of moving that audience into

action, or tapping into the incredible population of users inter-

acting on social networks that have not yet joined the ranks

of your brand’s community? It’s only in building an engaged

audience that you can tap into the holy grail of all advertising:

“Word of Mouth (WOM) at Scale.”

A new era in marketing is here, and the dividing line between what makes a good ad and what

inspires user engagement has all but dissolved. Going forward, an effective social ad strategy

must pull in new fans and followers, and also optimize for the types of users that want to engage

with your brand for the long haul.

In order to develop an ad strategy that results in long-term engagement, you have to develop

a campaign that plays off the existing, organic “rules of engagement” unique to each social

network. After all, what inspires Susan to share your brand post on Facebook will be quite

different from what moves John to re-tweet your brand message on Twitter. However, the clues

to building an effective ad campaign on either network can be found by observing what content

and ad strategies engaged both Susan and John.

In this report, Wildfire offers you a framework for understanding how users interact with

paid and owned content on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, and how to pay for the

kinds of ads now that will lead to additional “earned media” later. Let’s start by looking at

the differences between social advertising on these platforms…


Social Network Ad Summary

If we had to describe each social network with one word, what would it be?

Facebook = Connection

Twitter = Information

LinkedIn = Professions

See how those differences play out in our “Social Network Ad Summary” Table below:

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

Purpose Connection Information Professions

Consdierations for Audience/Targeting

1) Users want to stay in network (and Facebook charges less for ads to internal destination)

2) Utilize social ads to leverage users’ intent to connect with friends/family

1) Users expect fresh or “breaking news” content

2) Target promoted tweets to Timeline rather than search

3) Target only relevant geographies during international campaigns

1) Users identify by their professions – target accordingly

2) For maximum ad efficacy, focus on targeting specific groups of users, versus by targeting members of LinkedIn “Groups,” as these groups can include a broader selection of users (which dulls the effects of extensive targeting efforts!)

Key ad units Sponsored Stories = highest engagement

Promoted accounts, tweets, trends (note: “trends” are higher cost and require a Twitter ad rep)

Two placements available – right hand side and bottom of page

Channels/ Timing

Newly available: ads for Newsfeed and Mobile

Strong mobile consumption

Traffic peaks Mondays and Wednesdays; minimal weekend traffic

User traffic peaks during working hours— keep this in mind when targeting geographies and time zones


After you consider the different “rules of engagement” on each network, it’s essential to think holistically about how the individual parts of your user’s experience connect within one network. Specifically are you thinking about how the following all connect?

• your paid media (ads)

• your owned media (branded destinations like your Facebook page and all the custom content you create for it)

• your earned media (the viral reach being generated by users clicking, sharing and commenting on your content).

In the not-so-distant past, marketers may have thought about and managed these three media types independently in social, but we are experiencing a sea change in our industry. Social networks like Facebook are reinventing tra-ditional “push advertising” in favor of a new concept of paid placement for quality content (i.e. in Facebook’s case “sponsored stories” that the user would have seen anyway, just higher up in the feed and more persistent).

When your paid, owned and earned media are optimized together (through a virtuous cycle of testing and learning), you’ll decrease your advertising costs and have money left over to reach more new users! So please keep this con-text in mind as we dig into the specifics of ad optimization in the report ahead.

Summary

When considering advertising on the different social networks, you should be aware of the dynamics specific to that network to ensure you receive the most bang for your advertising buck.

In this report, you’ll learn specific best practices on the messaging, design, content, targeting, and optimization of social ads on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.


FacebookWhat is Facebook’s relevance to you as a marketer and advertiser? According to VentureBeat, American users spend over 6 hours a month interacting on Facebook. And with over 900 million monthly active users, that’s a tremendous audience that has the potential to bump into your brand. In the US itself, Facebook will account for 6.5% of all online ad spending in 2012.

Facebook’s ad revenues will swell more than 60% this year to reach $5.06 billion worldwide, af-ter posting growth of 68.2% in 2011 (according to eMarketer). Additionally, social ad (Facebook ads with social context such as a “Like” button) click-thru-rates (CTRs) have improved by 18% in 2011. This could mean that users are engaging more or ads are becoming more effective.

So what should you consider with respect to Facebook advertising?

Users want to stay in network where possible

We see time and time again that users don’t like to be taken outside of Facebook. Studies have confirmed that in comparison to ads on Facebook that stay in-network, ads that drop the user outside of Facebook lead to significantly higher bounce rates.

One study by SEOMoz confirmed that bounce rates from Facebook ads increased 41% over the typical bounce rates from those brands’ websites. In addition, the users that stayed around the site after clicking through to it were much less engaged with the content: SEOMoz reported a 57% decrease in time spent on the site as compared to typical page visitors.

Facebook wants you to stay in network

No surprise here, but in addition to users reacting poorly to being dropped outside of Facebook after interacting with an ad, Facebook itself appears to be incentivizing advertisers to grow their Facebook applications and Pages, with cost per click (CPC) campaigns that point to a page or tab within Facebook costing 29% less than those linking offsite.

Facebook is intentionally charging more favorable rates to advertisers who keep users inside the Facebook ecosystem, as this promotes what Facebook wants: more time spent on the network. This does, however, mean that you need to have a destination page or tab with engaging content to drive to; otherwise the efficacy you have built into your ads will be lost when users are sent to an untargeted page with no follow-thru-action (like your Timeline home page, for example, if your ad promised something more specific, such as a special promotional code or item).

41% higher bounce rates

57% less time spent on site

CPC costs 29% less when in-network


Ultimately, you, as a marketer, want your paid media (ads), owned media (your branded destinations) and earned media (the additional share of voice from people commenting, sharing, liking your content) working together in the most efficient way, and staying in network with a dedicated landing page tab enables this to happen.

Check out our blog for more tips on content and engagement: http://blog.wildfireapp.com/

Social ads perform better

The core of the Facebook network centers around connection. People are there to connect with their friends and family, and they also want to discover what other users are doing.

We see greater response rates when a brand’s message is paired with content that shows how a user’s friends or network have interacted with that brand. Essentially, your advertising message includes a trusted referral or endorsement from someone your users know.

Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s Product Director for Ads, confirmed this. According to Rajaram, branded messages paired with a social context result in a 68% higher ad recall and 4x greater likelihood that a viewer will purchase.

Social ads are Facebook ads that are set up to include Facbook graphic elements such as the “Like”button and list of friends who also liked the ad

Branded messages paired with a social context result in a 68% higher ad recall and 4x greater likelihood that a viewer will purchase.

Note: due to the enhanced performance of social ads, we will be focusing exclusively on this ad format for our report. Ads with no social context, which are ads that have no “Like” button or any tie-in with Facebook social data, can be used to drive user traffic outside of Facebook. While this strategy has its time and place, we will not be covering it in this report. A full breakdown of other types of ads Facebook offers can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/business/ads/

http://blog.wildfireapp.com


Other Best Practices for Facebook AdvertisingImages and Branding

You have 99x72 pixels of image space available to you. Ads with people, and especially close-ups of faces and eyes, tend to get a higher click through rate. Of course, it’s best to use an image that’s relevant to your ad. It’s best to upload horizontal (landscape) images to ensure you’re maximizing the space available in the small size available. You don’t want to use a vertically oriented picture, which leaves a gap of white space on the right hand side.

Where possible (like when you have the space), include branding in your image. Only a tiny percentage of people exposed to your ad will actually click on it, but many will see it (free impressions!) so it’s a great opportunity to maximize branding. Firenze Jewels, on the right, is a good example of strong branding with in the ad:

Title Copy

The title copy of your advertisement is often a fixed feature. Facebook will automatically pull in the title of your Fan Page, or the title of your app, to serve as the title of your ad if you’re driving traffic to thoselocations. The one ad unit where you have control over the title is the ad that drives outside of Facebook (and has no social plugins). While we don’t dive deeply into this ad format, one of the best pratices when you have the option to change the title is to ask a question. Ques-tions automatically trigger readers’ subconscious or conscious minds to answer. If your question is compelling enough, they will want to click through to see the answer. Another way to think of this is to try titles that will elicit some kind of reaction from your audience, like making them laugh or think. And of course—keep it succinct and limit your titles to one line.

This ad for Dillard’s demonstrates several best practices, including a horizontal image orientation, a close-up of a face (as it is relevant to the ad content), and a great call-to-action.

Since Jun Group has opted to set this ad up to drive traffic outside of Facebook, the ad can also have a customized Title.


Body Copy

The body copy of your ad should describe what you are offering and also convey why a user should pay attention or care. By pairing your advertising with a compelling reason to click (e.g. access to deals or promotions such as coupons, sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways), your ads will perform better. Facebook ad body copy is limited to 90 characters, so brevity is very important.

If you are targeting users based on certain “Likes & Interests” or demographic information, tie that information into your copy to make it feel more relevant for the user. For example, an ad targeting users living in Palo Alto, CA, will hook a user better if the words “Palo Alto” or “Bay Area” are in the copy.

Calls-to-Action

A critical ad factor, that often gets missed, is having a strong call-to-action (CTA). It seems logical that a user should know to click on an ad if they like it, right? Wrong. The truth is they aren’t likely to click unless they’re explicitly told. It’s a very strange phenomenon, but our learnings show that users respond to instruction, but will seldom act without it. That is why you’ll see a lot of “Click ‘LIKE’ if you enjoyed this” copy appended to posts within your News Feed. You don’t want users to be passive in their consumption of your content - passive consumption fails to generate that super-valuable earned media.

Ask people to click “Like”, “Comment” or “Click Here.” At Wildfire, we have seen up to a 4x increase in these types of behaviors when there is a clear ask, whether it’s in a Facebook post, an ad, or even a promotion.

All of the ads on this page have very specific calls to action within the body copy.


Targeting—balancing relevance with reach

Facebook lets you finely target which groups of people should see your ad. You can target ads based on users’ profile information, such as age, gender, location, college, relationship status, and interests. You can target those who are fans of your company’s Facebook page or friends of your fans. Or you can avoid your fans altogether, if your goal is growing your base with new, “never-before-seen” users.

Of course, by targeting very specifically to a group, you can increase the effec-tiveness of your ad, but be careful to balance this with a broad enough audience reach to ensure enough people see your content

CPC vs CPM

Ad prices on Facebook are determined by auction. You can pay based on cost-per-impression (CPM), which is the number of times people see the ad, or on cost-per-click (CPC), the number of times people actually click on it. Most ad-vertisers choose CPC, but it is worth testing both options to see which is more affordable.

One way to optimize a campaign for reach and spend is to blend a CPC and CPM approach. You start by running a series of ads on a CPC basis (note: you will need a person, or a service, to monitor results frequently). Once you’ve spent 48-72 hours optimizing your ads for the lowest CPC (by pausing the ads that performed poorly and reallocating the budget to better performers), you’ll have a good idea of what exact ad (copy, image, title, CTA) works best for your target demographic.

Then, you can pause the CPC campaign and re-launch that very same ad on a CPM basis, to the same demographic. Assuming it continued to be popular and engaging to the same demographic, you’d be getting the most “bang for your buck” by optimizing the ad first, then launching it in a way that was cheaper to serve.

Note: Facebook defines “Reach” as “the count of people who have seen any-thing associated with your page over a given length of time”. One effective way to understand if your targeting and demographic profiles are effective is to test a variety of campaigns across a selection of demographic buckets. This way, you can see if your ad resonates differently across various types of users, while main-taining your message’s wide coverage.


Sponsored stories are an opportunity for unprecedented brand advocacySponsored Stories are posts from users on Facebook that a busi-ness, organization or individual has paid to highlight on other users’ pages. Facebook calls these ads “a way to create organic and scalable word of mouth.” They are the only ad unit that Facebook has integrated into the newsfeed. Sponsored Stories are just one type of ad unit on Facebook, but one that is receiving a lot of attention because it consistently outperforms other ad types.

Facebook Ads API service provider TBG Digital has revealed that in a 10-day, 3-client, 2 billion impression test, Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories ad units received a 46% higher click through rate, a 20% lower cost per click, and an 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ad units.

Facebook is increasing the span of coverage achieved by Sponsored Stories. Starting in January 2012, Facebook gradually began showing Sponsored Stories social ads in the main News Feed of the web version of the site. Considering that users spend up to 27% of their time on Facebook reading through the News Feed, this is an enormous opportunity to capture users’ attention (ComScore, 2012).

Note: there are seven types of Sponsored Story ad units. You can read about them all here: http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/Face-bookAds/Sponsored_Stories_Guide_042511.pdf

Sponsored Stories ad units received a 46% higher click through rate, a 20% lower cost per click, and an 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ad units.

Logistics of Sponsored Stories in the News Feed

• Ads will be marked “Sponsored” at the foot of the post.

• Facebook is imposing a rate limit for appearances of a Sponsored Story in a user’s News Feed, ensuring that each user will see only 1 per day.

• Users will only see stories about friends or pages that they already like.

• Users cannot opt out of seeing Sposored Stories in their own feed or having their activity turned into Sponsored Stories in others’ feeds. That’s 901 million active Facebook users having potentially sponsored conversations about brands— an awful lot of mouths creating WOM!

http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Sponsored_Stories_Guide_042511.pdf

http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Sponsored_Stories_Guide_042511.pdf


Sponsored Stories for mobile

Sponsored Stories are not only set to be the first ad units to appear within the Facebook News Feed; they are also the first units to be released to the mobile Facebook platform! And with 55% of active Facebook users (~500MM) accessing the network from their mobile devices, advertisers utilizing Sponsored Stories in their advertising mix will have exclusive access to a majority of Facebook consumers who may not have otherwise seen their ads.

If you want to try Sponsored Stories for your brand, you have to do something crucial first: you must generate conversations and content (i.e. user activity) on your brand page so you have organic stories to use for a Sponsored Stories campaign.

The Wildfire Storyteller application

One way to do this is with the Wildfire Storyteller app. Using the Wildfire Storyteller app, you can create a tab in your Facebook Page to ask your users fun and engaging questions about your brand. You can then set up an entire customized Facebook Feed Story that gets published alongside that user’s generated response. This feed story is especially powerful in that you can include a branded video or image with the story and you can also customize the feed story title, URL and description.

For example, a coffee brand could ask about how people prefer to get their caffeine fix. The ad generated from the response would include your friend’s name and their com-ment, but it could also include a link to a daily coupon which users could pass on to their friends.

At Wildfire, we recently integrated Adaptly into our Social Marketing Suite. Adaptly is an ads management technology that allows you to automatically optimize ads instead of manually testing for the best-performing ads. It’s some seriously advanced tech.

The idea is that you load up a selection of creative assets (titles, images and body copy), and Adaptly will launch and run through every conceivable permutation of the options, all the while optimizing for a specific performance result. The technology will actively launch ads, assess their performance in real-time, and immediately pause poor perform-ers while reallocating budget to the stars in order to maximize the efficien-cy of your campaigns according to the performance metrics you set (e.g. cost-per-action or cost-per-fan). We can’t wait for you to try it!

We are excited about this for two reasons:

1) It helps marketers optimize their ad budgets while reducing time spent with manual ad building.

2) You can now optimize your ads within Wildfire’s same holistic platform where you manage the rest of your paid, owned and earned media.

55% of active Facebook users access the network from their mobile devices


You can see the Storyteller app in action on the Facebook tab in these images.

Managing your advertising mix

Because we believe that social ads significantly enhance your ads’ per-formance in driving engagement, we have covered them in great detail in this report. It is worthwhile to note however that it is important to balance fan growth ads (Marketplace Ads) with engage-ment-focused ads (Sponsored Stories) in your advertising mix.

Marketplace ads can be targeted at non-fans hence you can expect higher reach with Marketplace Ads due to broad targeting beyond your existing

fans or friends of fans. On the other hand, you can expect better conversions through Sponsored Stories due to WOM benefits shown in the ad units. A combi-nation of these formats working together will maximize your reach and effectiveness while keeping costs as low as possible.

The Storyteller app is used to start a conversation around customer prefernces at the Java Bean Cafe

Once a user inputs an answer, each answer is conversted into a potential sponsored by story, but with the page administrators pre-set image, custom links, and descriptive text.


TwitterTwitter has been the focus of much hype because of its addictive, real time information broadcasting, particularly in the global political arena.

It has 140 million monthly active users but those users, who are doing a broad range of activities on Twitter. Twitter is a less mature advertising platform than Facebook, rolling out advertising functionalities for brands in 2010. Uptake by advertisers, however, has grown very fast. With the introduction of Twitter Brand Pages in 2011, more advertisers are investing ad budgets in the network. In fact, according to eMarketer, you can see that from Mid 2011 thru 2012, the number of companies on Twitter jumped four-fold. In addition, advertising revenue on the network is steadily increasing.

Use Promoted Accounts to boost your follower rate and build your base

A “Promoted Account” a type of ad that is featured within search results and within the “Who To Follow” section on user’s Twitter pages, which helps followers discover new businesses, content, and people on Twitter. The rec-ommendations are made based on the Promoted Accounts that are most likely to appeal to a user.

Twitter’s ads marketplace is less mature than Facebook’s. (eMarketer)

However, it has come up to speed with advertisers very quickley.(eMarketer)

MetroPC is promoted as an account to fol-low, together with two organically selected accounts.


Promoted Tweets

Use Promoted Tweets to extend your reach to a broader audience and be in the right place at the right time.

Promoted Tweets can be targeted to show up at the top of search results, or to show up on user timelines.

Placement in Search

Promoting Tweets to Search, while it seems like a familiar strategy (in its striking resemblance to SEM) is not a very effective way to achieve high engage-ment or interaction with Twitter users. Generally, users aren’t on Twitter to search (it’s not typically aligned with their Twitter engagement behavior). At certain times, however, piggybacking your keywords against #hashtags and trending topics can have a significant impact.

For example, if people are talking about #earthday and you sell biodegradable containers, you are able to advertise against #earthday to have your promoted tweet show up at the top of resulting searches, thereby inserting your ad messaging into the conversation about the Earth day event.


Placement in the Timeline

The second option is targeting tweets to the Timeline. As you are aware, Twitter is 100% chronological. This means that it is likely many of your followers are regularly missing your tweeted content because they weren’t online to read it at the same time you were there to write it, and by the time they did scan their feed, your content was replaced with more fresh items posted by the other accounts they follow. Promoted Tweets targeted to users’ timelines appear at or near the top of their timeline when they log on or refresh their homepage, no matter what time it is. They can be targeted to your followers, so you can make sure they see your tweeted content anytime, or people that are similar to your followers. You are essentially paying for persistent visibility of your content.

Targeting to timeline is vastly more effective and engaging as people’s natural behavior is to read through their feed:

• targeting followers puts your message in front of your brand advocates, who will hopefully re-tweet on your be half, perpetuating your content for you.

• targeting users like your followers extends the reach of your campaign and brand to additional users who are likely to be receptive to your message, based on demographic and psychographic similarities to your existing followers.

Promoted Trends

Use Promoted Trends to ramp awareness and drive buzz and engagement by being featured as a “trending topic” at the top of the Trends list on Twitter’s homepage.

A Promoted Trend gets massive exposure as it is placed next to the hottest topics of the moment, and is optimally placed for kick starting or amplifying a conversation. The Promoted Trend functionality is currently in Beta, and it comes with a significant price tag (approximately $120,000 for 24 hours), so contact your Twitter rep for more details. AMC purchased the promoted trend “The Walking Dead” to

ptomote the popular show.

Note: you are likely to see far higher numbers of “qualified fans”, i.e. those who are truly interested in your product or service, when you target to a geogra-phy where your product is available rather than opening it up to regions where you don’t have a presence. If you don’t pay attention to geographic targeting when you set up your Twitter campaigns, you may inadvertently blow through your budget very quickly to produce low quality results.


Best Practices for Twitter Advertising

Keep Content Fresh and Engaging

One of the core concepts of the Twitter platform is the dissemination of what’s happening/news and real time information. As you can imagine, freshness of content is important. As a result, it is critical to refresh and re-promote new tweets regularly.

Marketers are seeing engagement numbers reach up into the single digits for Twitter advertising (which is much higher than the average 0.02% for online advertising in general).

Advertise by Geography

Twitter’s geographic targeting allows you to increase the relevance of your campaign by targeting your message to a specific geography. This results in boosted engagement rates because of relevance.

Mobile advertising

You’ll be heartened to hear that both Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets are rolling out on Twitter mobile. As 55% of Twitter’s monthly active users access the information network via mobile devices, mobile is really where the new money is waiting to be made.

Additional targeting can only benefit advertisers, because you get more bang for your buck by allowing more specificity through being able to select certain mobile OS’s to have your promoted items show to:


LinkedInLinkedIn is commonly known as the “Professional” social network.

According to LinkedIn, the network has a higher composition of high income earners, business decision makers, and college or post-college graduates than other leading social media networks.

Additionally, with 150 million monthly active users, LinkedIn serves as a powerful venue for companies seeking to interact with customers and prospects, build positive brand awareness, and drive revenue. Consider the latest statistics:

• Approximately two professionals sign up to join LinkedIn every second

• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members

• More than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.

Interestingly, LinkedIn, which has lower ad revenues and a lower growth rate overall than Twitter, is getting an increasingly greater share of its ad dollars from outside the US. This year, when the site will see $226 million in ad revenues, a 46.1% increase over 2011, 32% of that money will come from abroad. But, by 2014, it is anticipated that US advertisers will account for 60% of LinkedIn’s revenues of $405.6 million, according to eMarketer estimates, due to a stronger-than-expected advertising program on the site.

Logistics:

• There are two placement areas for Ads –the right bar and bottom of the page

• Market place ad units are identified by the phrase “Ads by LinkedIn Members”

• Ad units are composed of image, title, body and source of the ad unit - Image - Title = 25 characters max - Body = 75 charters max - Source = Citation of advertising company


Imagery and Branding

Since there is such a small amount of space to play with (50 pixels wide by 50 pixels high), images should be clean and minimal. Do not use an image composed solely of text, and be sure that the contents of your image are readable at this size.

As on Facebook, include an image with your ad that’s relevant to what you offer. A best practice is a version of your logo or mascot. Anecdotally, images of smiling professionals also tend to perform well.

A tip— the LinkedIn background color is white, so images with bright colors are more likely to capture the attention of your audience.

Link your title and copy to your audience

As mentioned, LinkedIn is job related so people identify heavily by profession and industry. Take advantage of this by creating ads and copy that are targeted by title, (e.g. have the term “CEO’s and Co-Founders” in the title of the ad) as this calls out specific users and increases their likelihood of paying attention. On LinkedIn, like on Facebook, ques-tions in the title can work well.

Have a strong CTA and keep it brief

Include strong call-to-action phrases like Try, Download, Sign up, or Request a Quote.


Consider running promotions to drive ad efficiency

Our initial tests show that running a Wildfire promotion in connection with a LinkedIn advertising campaign can double ad click-through rates and decrease cost per lead by more than 60%. Additionally, our tests have shown that the viral sharing rate for LinkedIn users can be up to several times higher than on other leading social networks.

Consider weekly trends when timing your campaigns

It’s no surprise, but weekend activity is very low on LinkedIn. Monday mornings tend to see increased impressions and click volume traffic grows through Wednesday. As a result, always try to launch new campaigns at the beginning of the week, in line with weekly traffic trends.

Additionally, activity on LinkedIn is highest during business hours. Keep this in mind when targeting ads by geographic region— their time zone will also determine their business hours, which is another reason to segment one ad campaign into many variations (like by time zone).

GIA paired a LinkedIn promotion with an adversting campaign and saw a 60% lowered cost per lead.


Optimization

LinkedIn will average the CTR of all ads in a campaign to create your overall quality score. The higher the quality score, the higher likelihood of your ad being served in the future.

It’s important to know that the auto-optimize feature in LinkedIn pauses campaigns that are generating less than 0.025% CTR. If your CTR is lower than 0.025%, create and test several additional ad variations. LinkedIn recommends that you create at least 3 different ad variations for optimiza-tion and you can create up to 15 within a single campaign. You can also try narrowing your target audience so that your ad becomes more relevant and receives more clicks.

Tip: It is not as effective to target LinkedIn member groups, as these can include users who are not necessarily part of your desired target audience.

Targeting

LinkedIn provides robust targeting parameters:

- Age and geographic region

- Company title

- LinkedIn member groups

If your CTR is lower than 0.025%, create and test several additional ad variations.

In Summary:

This report has covered a multitude of best practices in relation to the different social networks across imagery, copy, calls-to-action and targeting. In addition to these, three key takeaways we recommend you remember are:

1) Engagement rates vary by network. Build this into your expectations and measurement framework. You can expect to see 0.05% on Facebook, 1% (and hopefully more) on Twitter, and 0.025% on LinkedIn.

2) A strong call-to-action (CTA) is universally important across the different networks – don’t expect users to know what you want them to do. Be specific.

3) Think holistically about the entire experience you pres ent to users. For example, once you have created a high performing, optimized ad creative, are you delivering the best post-click experience possible? Does your landing page or destination seamlessly reinforce your ad message? Is it intuitive and well designed? Does it maximize social sharing of your content through built in stream stories and sharing capability? Ensure you have your paid, owned and earned activities working together.


Sources:

http://partner.linkedin.com/ads/bestpractices/index.html#ads

https://business.twitter.com/en/advertise/

https://www.facebook.com/advertising/

http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Pages_Overview.pdf

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/mobile-twitter-ads-smart-phones_b21191

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/three-pitfalls-that-every-smb-should-avoid-on-facebook

http//:EMarketer.com

http://press.linkedin.com/about

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008858

http://www.emarketer.com/PressRelease.aspx?R=1008806

http://partner.linkedin.com/ads/bestpractices/index.html#ads

https://business.twitter.com/en/advertise/

https://www.facebook.com/advertising/

http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Pages_Overview.pdf

http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/mobile-twitter-ads-smart-phones_b21191

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/three-pitfalls-that-every-smb-should-avoid-on-facebook

http://www.EMarketer.com

http://press.linkedin.com/about

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008858

http://www.emarketer.com/PressRelease.aspx?R=1008806

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