With social media advertising, you’re placing your adverts within social media feeds, such as Facebook or Instagram. Your ads can use a range of different formats, from simple text to videos or creative animations, and will be marked with an ‘ad’ or ‘sponsored’ icon.

Though many big brands use social media advertising, it’s a valuable and affordable marketing channel for small businesses too. It’s ideal for targeting specific audiences, increasing your reach, promoting offers, and launching new products. All in all, social ads are a great way to build awareness of - and drive web traffic to - your business.

Though social ads appear within users’ social media feeds, they behave slightly differently to regular, non-sponsored social posts. Normal posts that you make on your channels will generally only appear in the feeds of your existing followers, limiting you to current customers and fans of your brand. Social ads, however, are based on user demographic information like location, age, interests and so on, meaning your ads can be displayed to people who may not necessarily be following - or even previously aware of - your business or company. This makes social media advertising a great way to expand your existing social reach and find new potential customers. Social ads are conceptually very similar to display ads; the difference being that they appear on social networks rather than across the internet.

Many social networks allow for a choice between a CPM (cost per mille) fee structure where advertisers pay a fee for a certain number of impressions, or a pay-per-click structure where you pay the social network a fee every time someone clicks on your advertisement.

There are many reasons you should be investing in social media ads - here are just a few:

1. Popular - there’s no denying the increasing popularity of various social media networks, each of which appeals to a different demographic and provides an excellent space to reach your audience. Plus, these audiences are highly engaged, spending many hours a week on their chosen network
2. Targeted - not only can you pick the social network that most suits your product or audience, but within that channel, you can also carefully target your ads to users based on specific features from location to hobbies. As a result, you’re appealing to the right people in the best locations online and not wasting ad spend on an audience that isn’t relevant to your offering
3. Measurable - as with a variety of online advertising, you can easily track the success of your ads, giving you the freedom to tweak, rework or provide more budget as you go