Here's what you need to know about social ad platforms

Key quotes:

• "When it comes to social media marketing, there are many different platforms for your business to consider."
• "As you’re reading about the different social media platforms, keep the following themes and questions in mind."
• "According to Social Media Today, the breakdown of users in the United States by age range is as follows: The Competition Organic Reach is Declining Paid Dollars Help You Go Further Reputation Management B2B & B2C Stay Current Real-Time Communication Customer Service Text-Only Content Isn’t a Bad Thing Of the 330 million monthly active users on Twitter, 69 million of them are located in the United States."
• "The specific breakdown of users in the United States by age is as follows: Don’t forget about mobile! In the United States, 25% of users are men and 25% of women are on LinkedIn."

Key quotes:

• "Every once in a while, social media platforms introduce a feature that’s actually super useful."
• "(Sign up here if you’d like me to send them to you too!) Here are a few helpful things you may not realize you can do on social media platforms… Instagram’s certainly not the most link-friendly platform in the world and the chances are there’s more than one link you’d like to drive people to who check out your profile."
• "Here’s how: You know that awesome post you want everybody who visits your profile to see? You can use them to create themed lists of people to follow (publicly or privately) and accessing those lists essentially gives you an alternate news feed featuring only tweets from the people on that list."
• "Here’s how to use them: Facebook, Twitter, and just about every social media platform that offers advertising allows you to upload a list of email addresses you have (newsletter subscribers, customers, etc.) and target those people on their platforms with ads."

Key quotes:

• "You can even access the native analytics for insights into how to enhance the performance of your social media advertising campaign."
• "Whether you’re looking for reach, engagement, or sales — the case for advertising on social media marketing has never been stronger."
• "Posts from friends and family now receive priority, so organic reach for brands on social media is declining steadily — especially on Facebook."
• "Paid social media advertising is a cost-effective way to promote your business."
• "Social media advertising is a cost-effective way to create exposure for your brand."
• "Aside from coaxing leads down the funnel, ads for content will help you to drive web traffic, boost engagement on social media, and improve the ROI of your content marketing."

Key quotes:

• "Small business owners and solo social media managers usually don’t have the time to create or find enough high-quality content to post five times a day on Facebook or tweet 10 times a day on Twitter."
• "We were used to posting landscape videos and images because that was the ideal image size for most social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter."
• "These pieces of content reached people who may not have heard of Buffer before and converted some of them into our Facebook Page fans."
• "By curating photos that our target audience is interested in (and posting a few Buffer news), we have been able to grow a large engaged following on Instagram — with whom we share social media and marketing tips through Instagram Stories and live videos."
• "But just a year ago, we were still sharing YouTube links to our videos rather than uploading our videos onto the social media platforms (even when we could upload videos onto Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn through Buffer)."

Key quotes:

• "Our recommendation for the first step is to conduct a self-audit of all of your current social media profiles (or your competitor’s social channels if you’re not on social yet!)."
• "Once you have a full grasp of what’s going on with your channels and how to align your social media goals with your business goals, then you can start to fine-tune your online strategy."
• "Now that you have identified the ways that you want social media to help you reach your marketing and business objectives, it’s time to dive into each of the platforms! If you have already written down a plan for your social presence and paid ads strategy, now is the time to revisit those documents and update them with any new additions."
• "We recommend formatting ads for A/B testing by creating different creatives, copy, CTAs, and links to see what gets you the business and marketing objectives you want."