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The year 2020 has shown us that social media advertising is here to stay, and that allocating your budget to successful campaigns with a high ROI is more important than before. Many times businesses feel the return on print advertising can’t be accurately measured. The beauty of marketing via social media channels is the variety of insights provided that can be analyzed to continually improve your campaigns to achieve successful results.

Gone are the days where social media was solely for social interaction. In fact, research shows that 52% of all online brand discovery still happens in public social feeds (organic & paid). This suggests that the majority of consumers use Instagram and Facebook to investigate a new company before even visiting their website!

Build brand awareness and loyalty by engaging with your followers and curating a feed that gives consumers a feeling of trust and relatability. Of course this means understanding the algorithms and the importance of curating captivating content. Let’s break down common questions surrounding social media advertising.

What are the benefits of social media marketing?

Social media is proven to increase brand awareness, inbound traffic, conversion rates, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and most importantly is measurable and cost effective.

Audience Growth: Facebook v Instagram

Of all social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram are proven to be the most interactive and can produce the best ROI. However, the benefits of each are very subjective and depend on which features are being used, your industry, audience, and other factors.

Facebook
- Facebook launched in February 2004, and introduced Facebook Ads in November of 2007. The platform was originally created to help people stay in-touch with family and friends and became an advertising powerhouse with the launch of Facebook Ads and Business pages in 2007.According to Statista, Facebook reported almost 1.79 billion daily active users and overall, daily active users accounted for 66% of monthly active users. This number continues to grow by 9% compared to the year before, despite the speculation that Facebook is “dying”.

Instagram
- Instagram launched in October 2010 and is a younger platform focused on storytelling through images and now instagram reels and stories. Instagram ran its first ad in November 2013. By 2017, Instagram was averaging more than 2 million businesses with purchased ads, compared to Facebook’s 5 million.
- However, according to Statista, Instagram has over 500 million daily active users out of 1 billion monthly active users, making Instagram a powerhouse when it comes to audience engagement.

Audience: Facebook v Instagram

Facebook may not have the highest engagement, but because it is the oldest platform the audience is huge, with more than 2.45 billion monthly active users. Facebook differs from other social media platforms that show strong trends in users by age. The average age for a Facebook user ranges from 18-49, with little variance in between. However, Facebook is the most popular social network among seniors and the majority of the users are in the United States.

Of this 1.79 billion daily users, the ad audience reach for the U.S. is only 183 million people. This audience size has also seen a decrease in the past year from 3% to .4% - a fairly significant dip.

Instagram’s growth continues to be studied and monitored by marketers. In the United States, the network reaches over 37% of the population. The global audience is diversified, with only 11% of Instagram users represented by the U.S. eMarketer estimates 2020 will reveal a growth of over 5% in the U.S. compared and anticipates this number to continue growing at this growth rate.

More adults use Instagram than you would think, with 37% in 2019. The network is also significantly more popular amongst the younger generations. 67% of users are between the ages of 18-29. Here’s a breakdown from Hootsuite:

- 18-27: 67%
- 30-49: 47%
- 50-64: 23%
- 65+: 8%

Another important and interesting insight to Instagram’s audience is that the gender demographics are pretty even - 48% female and 52% male.

All of these statistics are important to research when considering your buyer personas. You should always analyze your business’s audience and design your strategy based on this information rather than the overall network statistics.

Brand engagement: Facebook v Instagram

It’s no surprise that consumers rarely engage with branded social content compared to all content on a social platform. A study by Forrester revealed that on six of the seven social networks, the brands studied had an engagement rate of less than 0.1%. So, between Instagram and Facebook, which platform has the highest engagement? Depending on the blog you read, you’ll render different results. According to the Forrester study, one platform stood out the most: Instagram.

Facebook launched Facebook Business Pages to support the Facebook Ads launch in 2007, and now has over 60 million business pages. 39% of Facebook users that follow Facebook Business Pages do so because they want to receive special offers. Interestingly enough, the average organic reach of a Facebook post is only 6.4% of the Page’s total likes. Statista reports that in 2019 the social network’s marketing spending reached almost 9.9 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of over 2 billion U.S. dollars from 2018. However, despite this level of spending, the engagement on Facebook with paid branded content is still under .1%.

A study by Merkle reveals that ad spending on Instagram is 23% higher than facebook. What is driving this shift in ad spending to Instagram’s platform? Story ads and higher engagement.

Types of Ads: Facebook v Instagram

Facebook offers Facebook Ads Guide for types of ads. These ad types include: Image Ads, Video Ads, Carousel Ads, and Collection Ads. Facebook provides thorough research where their teams explored the effectiveness of ads based on engagement, exploring text, timing, and format considerations. You can find some of this research here. Facebook’s targeting tools are considerable, and allow you to narrow down by purchase behavior, interests, location, demographics, Facebook communities, and more. You can create Core, Custom, and Lookalike Audiences for your ad delivery to increase relevance, thus leading to higher ad engagement.

Instagram ad types consist of feed posts and story ads. Both types look just like regular posts and stories, but are labeled with a “Sponsored” label and include a call to action button with options to send to your messages, website, Instagram profile, etc. According to AdEspresso, the average engagement rate for Instagram branded posts is 4.3%, compared to Facebook’s 1.5%.

The user experience for Instagram story ads shows most users don’t realize they’re seeing an ad play back to back, revealing a smooth experience that isn’t too interruptive. Additionally, because an Instagram story takes up the entire screen there is no competition with other content and when targeted correctly, the experience feels organic. Therefore, consumers are more likely to engage.

Both are measured by reach & impressions. Reach is the number of unique views on a post. Impressions are the total number of times a post was seen. Both metrics provide helpful insights to your ad performance and allow you to make adjustments to improve your ad engagement overall.

Cost: Facebook v Instagram

A study in 2019 found that the average CPM for Instagram is $5.14 per 1000 visits. While the average CPC for Instagram ads is between $.20 and $2.00. Compared to Facebook’s CPM of $5.12 and CPC of $.80, Instagram wins again in this category. This study is a broad estimation, and certain factors like your target audience will affect these costs. Let’s discuss a few factors that affect the ad costs.

Ad Relevance - Facebook takes into account the relevancy of your ad amongst your selected target audience and factors this into the cost of the ad. Facebook and Instagram provide a relevancy score that changes while your ad runs. If you receive high engagement, your score will increase. If consumers are hiding your ad, your score will go down. A/B testing is a great way to determine what is relevant to your audience. Remember to only change one factor so that you receive concise data. Similar to a Google algorithm, the more relevant your content is to your target buyers and ad audience, the less expensive your ads will be.
Target audience - If you are targeting a popular audience that is high-demand, the cost will fluctuate.
Time of year - like any retail or sales strategy, the time of year will determine the cost of the ad. Popular times of the year, like holidays, will affect the ad cost.
Ad Run Dates - Obviously, the longer you run an ad the more your cost will increase. The average ad doesn’t necessarily need to run for a long period of time. Assessing your impression and reach goals will help guide you to determine a reasonable ad length and price.

When Apple announced it’s latest iPhone software operating system, iOS14, it went all in on privacy features. This is nothing new for the leading phone manufacturer, but Apple wants their customers to have greater control than ever over their information.

This is an admirable effort on Apple’s part, as businesses like Facebook and Google come under scrutiny for mismanaging user data. But how do the new features, which are already adopted by 25% of users, affect your ability to effectively market your business?

What has changed?

The new notification makes users more aware than ever of how their data is used across the internet, mostly for targeted advertising.

Normally, new features of a phone operating system wouldn’t mean much to businesses that aren’t involved in that ecosystem. But with Apple’s iOS14, which released on September 16, businesses that rely on targeted advertising and marketing are more affected than ever.

The new system will require apps to ask users to allow data to be tracked and saved to their unique online profile, most commonly used for targeted advertising.

Facebook went so far as to warn app developers that the new privacy changes will severely weaken its ability to track users and serve targeted ads.

“Our ability to deliver targeted ads on iOS 14 will be limited…” Facebook said in a release. “As a result, some iOS 14 users may not see any ads from Audience Network, while others may still see ads from us, but they’ll be less relevant.”

Audience Network is Facebook’s system for utilizing the unique identifiers that phones create for their owners. They read that info and create a profile for ad targeting that can follow the user into other apps and services. This also helps Facebook build its audience data for paid ads in business manager, which has been a powerful tool for businesses to reach potential customers.

How immediate is the change?

The tracking features do still exist, as the operating system did not outright kill them. That unique identifier, called the IDFA (ID for advertisers) is still on a user’s iPhone. But the big change comes from iOS14 forcing apps to ask the user for permission to track. This weakens the potential effectiveness of the IDFA.

When given the choice, we can assume many users will refuse to allow apps to track their data. In 2020, the digital landscape is shaped by the ongoing struggle between privacy concerns of users, and the need for businesses to reach new audiences through targeted advertising.

So as more users come to adopt the OS and learn about the privacy features, the more people will inevitably opt out of data tracking within apps. Once an app is opened for the first time after the user updates their phone, they will see a pop-up that asks if they want to allow the app to save their data.

How should you adapt?

After Facebook put out its warning to developers, Apple decided to hold back some of the features until next year. The goal is to give app developers more time to adjust to the changes.

Users even have the ability to opt out of receiving targeted ads based on the profile stored on their phone.

It won’t be until 2021 that Apple forces all apps to warn users about the data tracking.

“We are committed to ensuring users can choose whether or not they allow an app to track them. To give developers time to make necessary changes, apps will be required to obtain permission to track users starting early next year,” reads Apple’s developer note.

So if your business provides an app to customers on Apple’s App Store, you do have additional time to comply with the changes and develop your app around the idea that users can opt out of providing data.

But even if you don’t have an app, this change still heavily affects your business’ ability to reach new customers that are potentially prime to spend money with you. Should Facebook abandon its utilization of the IDFA, one of the largest sources of user data will be dampened.

Since this is a war of sorts between user’s concerns and advertisers’ need for data, it is important to remain sympathetic to the users.

In the end, you likely have a level of concern for your digital privacy as well. Try to think about the things that you wouldn’t want data trackers to know. You can then build your targeted marketing campaigns to not be blatantly directed at the user.

You can still utilize the audience databases that exist, but avoid looking like you’re specifically targeting a single action or interest. This will all help maintain good will among privacy-minded customers.

It might also be beneficial to broaden the audiences that you target. If your business sells to mountain bikers, for example, you can keep your audience size large by including all kinds of bikers in your targeting. If the mountain bikers start opting out of data tracking, that audience will shrink within the ad networks. And the more people feel like ads are being forced upon them via hyper-specific targeting, the less they will trust you.

If your business values a balanced approach to targeted advertising and marketing, contact The Post and Courier Advertising today.

Category: Advertising

Social Media Advertising: Facebook vs Instagram