For many businesses, the appeal of social media and content marketing is in the price. In comparison with traditional forms of marketing – such as TV, radio and print advertising – content marketing is practically a bargain. It doesn’t cost much to buy a domain name and have a website built and hosted, while social media profiles are free. You might choose to pay for content marketing services to ensure that your marketing activities are as successful as possible, but you’ll still save thousands by choosing content marketing over traditional marketing techniques. Recently, however, the major social network providers have begun to feel frustrated that they’re missing out on all of the juicy revenue that businesses such as your own could provide. As such, they’ve taken steps to monetise their services in order to take advantage of the thousands of companies looking to market their products and services through social media. Do you have to bite the bullet and simply accept these costs if you want to reach out to your audience, or is there a way around them?
Paid-for engagement
You’ve probably heard that it’s possible to pay for social media engagement on many of the most popular networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These services aren’t lining the pockets of the social networks themselves, however, but third party businesses working to boost your company’s social media presence. The theory is that these additional likes, favourites, friends and followers will help to trick Google into rewarding your business’ posts and pages with a more favourable search ranking. Google’s algorithms, however, are carefully devised to reward organic engagement, and the keyword here is ‘organic.’ The search engine will see through such a transparent ruse nine times out of ten, and there really is no substitute for honestly earned social media engagement. Quality content is key, and these paid-for services won’t benefit your business one bit – you can’t trick your way to the top.
Promoted posts
Both Facebook and Twitter now offer the option of promoted posts for businesses and individuals alike. For a fee, the social network will push your latest post, helping it to stand out prominently in the news feeds and timelines of users and ensuring that it’s seen by your target audience. The idea behind promoted posts is that increased exposure will help your content gain additional, organic engagement, but it’s worth remembering that your potential customers won’t click on a link simply because it’s there. Promoted posts don’t come cheap, and if you’re paying to promote boring content you aren’t going to experience any tangible results whatsoever. The more compelling your content, the more organic engagement it will receive. You can choose to promote your posts if you so wish, but if your content is good enough, you shouldn’t need to.
Advertisements
Social media advertising is a contentious topic. From the perspective of the social networks themselves advertising is a significant source of revenue, so offering advertising services to businesses is a great way of monetising their sites. Social media audiences are very discerning, however, and it’s likely that any adverts that turn up on your personal social media pages will go ignored. Twitter offers ‘Ads’ accounts for businesses, where they can benefit from promotional and analytical tools in return for a fee. Facebook, meanwhile, offers a paid-for direct advertising service, where businesses can choose to have banner adverts inserted into the news feeds of their potential customers. Neither of these services comes cheap, and it’s worth remembering the nature of your social media audience. Contemporary online audiences have short attention spans and aren’t afraid to make their feelings known – if your ads are annoying them, you can expect to hear about it. Furthermore, many users now make use of ad blocking applications to help filter out content they don’t want to see, so that ad you’ve spent so much money on may not even get to them in the first place. Is it really worth splashing out on paid-for advertising when you could concentrate on content marketing instead?
Despite the best efforts of social media providers to monetise their services, you’re still far better off using the free services and spending your marketing budget on content marketing instead. If you’d like to find out more about how our content marketing services could help you to achieve your marketing aims this year, don’t hesitate to contact us today.