Certified Digital Marketing Professional

Module 4: SOCIAL MEDIA

MARKETING.

PRESENTED BY
[SOBOTAMOH Elias M. Ngi]
Version 7.0
Certified Digital
Marketing
Professional
(CDMP)

Module 4

SOCIAL MEDIA
MARKETING.
Version 7.0
SOBOTAMOH Elias Manyi NGI
Board Chair @ AdMeUp Digital Academy

• Digital Investment Consultant .

• Board Chair of 4 ROCKS Investment LLC.
• Board Chair of AdMeUp Digital Academy LLC.
• 19 Years experience in investment management
• Expert in Digital strategy and planning.
• Researcher in the applicability of IoT
• Member of IEEE.

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This module is divided into two parts; organic and paid social media marketing. Let’s start with
organic.

When talking about organic social media marketing, there are a few key areas you need to
consider first before diving into the functionalities of social media platforms. In this module, we
will discuss these areas in detail and share key terminology, concepts, best practices, watch-outs,
tools and more.

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Let’s kick things off with an introduction to social media marketing.

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We’ll start by first discussing some general concepts related to social media marketing like;
storytelling, the roles & responsibilities of a social media marketer, how social media marketing
fits into the digital paid owned & earned ecosystem, the buyer’s journey, platform principles and
hashtags. Let’s begin with the definition of social media marketing and its evolution.

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By definition, social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that utilizes social networking
platforms to increase brand and product exposure and cultivate relationships with consumers.

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Social media came into existence when platforms like Friendster, Myspace and LinkedIn launched
in the early 2000s. By 2004, when Facebook launched for college students, behaviors that were
once relegated to IRL were commonplace online – everyone was collecting digital friends, then
sharing their “status”, photos and comments for everyone to see.

After the launch of YouTube and Twitter in 2005 and 2006 respectively, brands were quickly trying
to figure our ways to engage these burgeoning audiences in an authentic way. Facebook soon
responded to this business need by launching Pages and ads, and other platforms followed suit
with their own advertising offerings as well as verified and business accounts. Social media users
began to regularly leverage the platforms to share their support or air their grievances about
brands, forcing brands and businesses to pay attention and recognize the value of social media
not only for marketing, but for customer service also.

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With the launch of Tumblr, rich media began to take precedent in 2007, later becoming king in
2010 with the launch of Instagram. In 2012, social media marketing swelled – Facebook saw the
value of visuals and purchased Instagram for $1 billion while also solidifying itself as the leader in
the social media space with 1 billion users. All the while, 2012 also marked the launch of visual
purveyors Pinterest and Snapchat. Now with so many platforms on which to split their time and
attention, social media users began to value shorter, more snackable content that was easily
consumed via mobile device whilst on the go. Platforms like Vine capitalized on this with their
video content maxing out at 6 seconds in length and was subsequently purchased by Twitter.
Instagram later added video as well, and now content that is useful and provides value is table
stakes in order to achieve engagement.

In the beginning, one’s ‘friends’ were the center of the social media universe; now, social media is
more self-centered than ever as users demand hyper-relevant, personalized content from brands
and cutting edge technical innovation from platforms that enable them to augment their own
content through filters, lenses, and 360 degree angles. Who knows where the next 15 years will
take us…

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Social media marketing has many benefits, chief among them the ability to build relationships
with new and existing customers. The agility of social media enables brands to leverage these
relationships as a real-time focus group for new ideas and products, creating a nearly instant
feedback loop.

The adaptiveness of social media allows for flexibility with your creative – because of the
aforementioned feedback loop, you will know very quickly whether or not your creative is
resonating with the desired audience. Lastly, due to your ability to build meaningful relationships,
quickly adjust creative, and target for optimal relevance, social media generally yields a higher
ROI than most other marketing channels.

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Storytelling has always been of cultural importance due to its ability to entertain, educate and
instill moral values. In social media, you can use stories to highlight your brand, connect to your
community and build relationships in an educational and entertaining way that makes it very
consumable and authentic. Need more proof? Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook all have
features called ‘Stories’ now to better enable their users to engage in storytelling.

Stories are a great vehicle to humanize your brand and build credibility.

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By now, you’re familiar with the ‘Paid/Owned/Earned’ digital marketing ecosystem. All three
elements are integral to your digital marketing strategy and social media plays a role in each.

• Paid media is a great way to promote content in order to generate more earned media and can
also be used to drive traffic directly to your owned media properties, and with social media,
you can achieve that by using platform-native ads and paid influencers.
• Owned media is an extension of your brand and creates additional avenues for people to
interact with your brand, and your brand’s social media channels do just that.
• Earned media is the equivalent of online word of mouth and is the vehicle that drives traffic,
engagement and sentiment around a brand. Whenever someone likes, comments on, shares or
reposts your brand’s content, that is earned media.

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As a social media marketer, you have to be social at the core. You need to incite, facilitate,
encourage and participate in conversations to help connect with others and subsequently build
relationships. Building relationships in your community increases brand affinity and trust.
However, in order to build these relationships, it’s important to remember that social interactions
should be a value exchange, so do make sure that when you participate what you’re saying is
either entertaining or provides utility to be resonant and impactful to the community.

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To be successful, a social media marketer should be executing ten major tasks:
• Developing relevant content topics to reach the company’s target customers.
• Creating, curating and managing all published content.
• Monitoring, listening and responding to the community in a manner that ultimately drives
business.
• Nurturing and growing the community and any influencer outreach efforts.
• Overseeing design (e.g.: profile cover, profile pic, thumbnails, ads, landing pages, blog, etc.).

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• Designing, creating and managing promotions and social ad campaigns.
• Analyzing, reviewing and reporting ROI on key metrics; creating best practices and optimizing
strategy as needed.
• Monitoring trends in social media tools, applications, channels, design and strategy.
• Identifying threats and opportunities in user-generated content (UGC) surrounding the
company.
• Reporting notable threats to appropriate management.

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As you know, the five stages of the Buyer’s Journey starts with consumer Awareness, then
Interest, Consideration, Purchase Conversion and finally Retention.

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The marketing functions of the Buyer’s Journey are Campaign Planning, Consumer Awareness,
Purchase Conversion, Customer Retention and Analysis & Optimization. Social Media can aid in all
points of the Buyer’s Journey and serves all marketing functions depending on your brand’s/
campaign’s objectives.

For example, if you want to increase awareness to ensure you’re included in the consumer’s initial
consideration set, you should set your campaign objectives for reach and use educational and/or
storytelling content. If you want to drive purchase, make sure your post/ad types are optimized
with the appropriate CTAs to create a frictionless path to conversion.

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The five major social platforms are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Snapchat – and
each have a distinct, differentiating use case for marketers.

Facebook, and Instagram by extension, are great for large-scale reach. Both platforms boast a
variety of ad types with the opportunity for customization, as well as detailed targeting
capabilities.

Twitter is prime for real-time participation in a relevant cultural moment or event. For example, if
you want to join the conversation around a major sporting event like the World Cup or Super
Bowl, award shows like the Oscars and Grammys, popular TV show premieres and finales, a
business conference, or music festival – Twitter is a great vehicle (though you must be careful of
sponsorship stipulations associated with major events). People also often take to Twitter seeking
rather immediate customer service, so it’s important to have service representatives listening and
responding on Twitter regularly. Lastly, Twitter is great for sharing company news and product
updates.

LinkedIn is a platform focused on professional networking, so it’s great for recruitment, building
relationships with current employees, fostering affinity groups, sharing corporate news, targeting
corporate consumers (e.g.: American Express targeting HNW business travelers for Platinum
Card), B2B communication and reaching consumers in an aspirational mindset.

Lastly, Snapchat’s interface is centered around its vertical orientation and ephemeral storytelling
content. Snapchat’s unique ‘Discover’ channels provide brands with the ability to serve ads and
collaborate with publishers like BuzzFeed, Daily Mail, The Wall Street Journal and more. The
platform made the use of augmented reality mainstream with its facial lenses (which can be
sponsored by brands) as well as other unique personalization and customization capabilities like

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While many of these platforms have adjusted their algorithms in such a way that brands have to
‘pay to play’, organic social media marketing is still an important element of your overall strategy.
Organic social media marketing is when one leverages the free tools provided by each social
network. This non-paid marketing can help your business by reinforcing the brand’s values and
aesthetic, validating the brand through the sharing of company news, reviews and media
placements, and increasing customer loyalty and affinity through engaging with and responding
to customer comments.

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So now let’s walk through some of the key terminology that is used across social platforms.

The Home Feed, also referred to as the News Feed or Timeline, is a center of content discovery on
each social platform where you see posts from friends, brands you are connected with and
advertisements from organizations that want to connect with you.

Engagements include actions that users take on a social post and include likes/reactions,
comments, retweets/regrams, shares, etc.

A username is how users are identified on Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, and is usually
preceded by the @ symbol.

The block feature allows users to remove followers, disabling them from re-following, mentioning,
direct messaging or otherwise contacting you on the platform.

A mention is a post or comment that contains another user’s username anywhere in the body of
the message.

And finally, a follower is another user who has subscribed to receive and view your posts in their
feed.

It is important to be well versed in these terms as they are part of the regular nomenclature on
social media.

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Each platform generally has three classifications for their account types:

1. If you have a Public account, it means your posts are visible to anyone, whether or not they
have an account on the platform.

2. Posts from Private accounts are only visible to followers whom the account owner approves.

3. A Verified account lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic (and the
official account for that entity), marked by a blue verified badge or check mark.

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A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by the # symbol, and is used to categorize keywords or
topics allowing users to easily find and follow topics/conversations of interest to them. By clicking
on a hashtag, it will display all other posts shared with that particular hashtag included, so it’s a
great way to discover, organize and track topics/conversations of interest.

Because they’re such a great aid for discoverability, hashtags can help marketers increase brand
recognition, expand their reach and target new customers. Hashtags also make it easy for
marketers to create, join or impact a conversation that is culturally relevant or relevant to their
business.

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Hashtag use does come with a set of best practices. In terms of hashtag creation, SEO keywords
make great hashtags because they are often short and will increase discoverability. Also consider
using popular hashtags such as #TBT, #PhotoOfTheDay, #NoFilter, when relevant to increase
discoverability and show understanding of the platform

Create a branded hashtag for your company and monitor your community’s hashtags before
implementing to ensure relevance and avoid controversy. Do be sure to capitalize the hashtag in
the appropriate places to improve brand recognition and readability and keep them short –
brevity aids memorability and leaves more space for other commentary and links.

It’s important to avoid using spaces or punctuation in a hashtag as it will make it separate from
the keyword and make it unsearchable. Finally, you should also avoid using a lot of hashtags at
once; the fewer hashtags in a post, the better as they take up space and can make your post seem
spammy and less authentic.

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A branded hashtag is one that is unique to your business, usually including your company name,
company tagline, campaign or contest name used for driving participation and engagement.
Branded hashtags are a best practice because they are unique to your business and can be used
to drive participation and engagement.

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Now that we’ve covered the basic tenets of social media marketing, let’s dive into each of the
major social platforms, starting with Facebook!

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In this section, we’ll cover general concepts about the platform, including key terminology and
platform features that are most valuable to marketers. We’ll then walk you through how to set up
your Facebook presence and customize it to your business needs. And lastly, we’ll discuss all the
different types of page posts and show you how to publish content.

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Facebook, the largest social platform, enables people to share information and content with
others who work, study and live around them all around the world. Additionally, Facebook is a
platform for brands and businesses to connect and build relationships with their consumers.

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Each platform has its own terms, so let’s walk through the key terms for marketing on Facebook:
• News Feed: A list of stories determined by a proprietary Facebook algorithm that are
constantly being updated based on the people and Pages your audience follows on Facebook.
• Desktop Right Column: An ad placement option (only available for desktop placement) that
appears in the right-hand column on a user’s Facebook timeline but does not appear in News
Feed.
• Facebook Page: Similar to a personal Facebook profile, except they are used by businesses,
brands and organizations to share their stories and connect with people.
• Facebook Ads: Targeted advertisements used to reach different audiences with the purpose of
meeting your business goal. Facebook Ads comprise creative (image, video, and/or text), a
target audience and a bid.
• Business Manager: A platform that lets businesses more securely share and control access to
their ad accounts, Pages and other assets on Facebook.
• Ad Type: The format of your chosen ad and an Ad Set is a group of ads that represents a
specific part of your audience that you want to reach and includes one or more ads, a budget
and a schedule. Facebook Ad Sets can be created for each audience segment by making the ads
target the same audience within that ad set.
• Ad Placement: The location you would like your ads shown. Multiple placements can be chosen
for each ad.
• Objectives: The goals you want to achieve with your Facebook ads, such as clicks to website,
brand awareness, mobile app installs, etc.

It’s important to note that a Facebook campaign revolves around the advertising objective you

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Facebook also has a few features that are for marketing use:
• 360: A panoramic, immersive and interactive content form which gives viewers a 360-degree
field of vision using their mouse, keyboard, fingers or device.
• Facebook Events: A calendar-based resource which can be used to notify users of upcoming
events or occasions to reach a large number of people in a short amount of time.
• Milestones: A type of Page post that lets you highlight key moments on your Page's timeline.
You can use Milestones to share important events that tell the story of what your Page is
about.
• Facebook Live: Allows people, public figures and Pages stream and share live video with their
followers and friends.
• Branded Content: Any form of content – including text, photos, videos, instant articles, links,
360 videos and Live videos – from Facebook Page owners that features third party products,
brands, or sponsor.
• Facebook Messenger: A communication tool that can be used by marketers to engage with
customers via private message.

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There are two ways you can engage and share information on Facebook – through a Profile or a
Page.

• Profiles are for non-commercial use and represent individual people. Through your Profile, you
can amass friends and you can also follow profiles to see public updates from people you're
interested in but aren't friends with.
• Pages look similar to personal profiles, but offer unique tools for businesses, brands and
organizations and are managed by people who have personal profiles. You can ’like’ a Page to
see updates from that business in your News Feed.

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As a business, it’s important to set up and maintain a Facebook Page as a means to connect with
your audience and deliver your business objectives. One needs to first have a Personal Profile on
Facebook in order to be able to create and manage a Facebook Page.

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When creating a Facebook Page for your business, it’s important to customize the Page in a way that
conveys your brand identity and will engage the target audience.

Your Page name should be the name of your brand or business. Similarly, the Page’s URL should also
be the brand’s name but should be regional, if applicable.

For the About Section, consider optimizing with a general description, a mission, company
information, or your story – the copy should be brief, yet descriptive. By doing so, your audience can
get a sense of what your Page represents before they decide to like it. Also be sure to include a link to
your company website.

Profile photos display at 170x170 pixels on your Page on computers, 128x128 pixels on smartphones
and 36x36 pixels on most feature phones. Your Page’s profile picture will be cropped to a circular
shape in ads and posts, but will remain the same square shape when people visit your Page List Item.

Cover photos display at 820 pixels wide by 312 pixels tall on your Page on computers and 640 pixels
wide by 360 pixels tall on smartphones. They do not display on feature phones. Cover photos load
fastest as an sRGB JPG file that's 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes. For profile
pictures and cover photos with your logo or text, you may get a better result by using a PNG file.

Page admins can select from a group of call-to-action buttons to add to the top of their Page. The
seven call-to-actions available are: Book Now, Contact Us, Use App, Play Game, Shop Now, Sign Up,
and Watch Video.

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After you create your page you can continue to edit your Page’s details by clicking ‘Settings’ on the top right
of your Page. It’s important to ensure that all of your Page details are accurate. Your company’s description
in the About section should be full of SEO-friendly keywords relevant to your business.

Having a trackable link back to your company’s website is important to be able to better understand the
efficacy of your Facebook Page in driving interest and traffic to your business.

You should select a profile photo that is easily recognizable – like your company’s logo. Think of your cover
photo as the portion of your Page that's ‘above the fold’. If it's distracting or poor quality, people will be more
likely to click off the page.
Many of the best Facebook cover photos include a single subject as the focal point. They also use negative
white (i.e., empty space) as an advantage to make the subject, text and other elements unique to Facebook
(like the CTA button on Facebook business Pages) stand out even more. Be careful not to hide content behind
your Profile photo or on the bottom of the photo where your Page name and CTA button are located.

Do also add your business’ location with a map link to make it easier for customers to see where you are.

Customize the tabs that appear to visitors in the left column of your Page, and sections appear in the middle
of your Page to make it more user-friendly to your desired customer. Keep in mind that some tabs and
sections can't be removed (such as Home, About, Likes, Posts, Photos and Videos), and others can't be
reordered (such as Home). You can only remove the following tabs and sections: Events, Groups, Notes,
Services, Shop, Jobs, Offers and Reviews. When you reorder the tabs on the left side of your Page, the
sections in the middle of your Page will also change to be in the same order. For example, if you reorder your
Page's tabs to make the Photos tab appear first, the Photos section in the middle of your Page will also
appear first.

Lastly, take a look at the Partner Apps and Services section to see which apps are relevant and can help your
business.

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Facebook Page posts are a way to generate engagement with fans and target audiences. Through
Page posts, you can share company news, product announcements, tips, contests, events, stories
and more.

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Published Page Posts can be strategically targeted both organically through the post composer and via
Facebook ads to gain greater distribution. Organic posts are published to your Page for free and are only
visible to a fraction of those that have liked or subscribed to your Page updates.

If you desire more reach and engagement, you can give your post a boost – the Boost Post button allows you
to quickly create a Facebook ad using your published post. This ad can appear in different places on
Facebook, and you can show it to an audience of people you define. Boosted posts are also a way to reach
new people who are likely interested in your content but don't currently follow you on Facebook. Your
boosted post can include a call-to-action button so that you can drive people to take other actions you care
about, like booking an appointment, signing up for a newsletter, getting in touch with your business and
more.

Targeted boosted posts can be shown to the audience of your choosing. You can define a new audience
based on things like location, interests and more. You can also create a custom audience based on contacts
you already have or a lookalike audience based on people who've already shown interest in your business
Page.

Boosted posts can be placed on the Desktop NewsFeed, Mobile NewsFeed and Instagram. The Audience
Network placement is available for boosted posts that use video in the creative.

The budget for boosted posts is customizable. The boosting fee depends on how many people you want the
post to reach as the payment depends on the number of impressions the post gets with time. You can select
a pre-populated budget or set a custom amount. Boosted posts require a minimum budget of $1 a day.

The ad you create will look just like the Page post it's based on. The only difference is that your ad will appear
with a ‘Sponsored’ label in the top-left corner and will have a CTA button in the bottom-right corner, if you
choose to add one.

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There are a variety of different Page Posts. Let’s go through each in detail.
• Link Posts are simply posts that link to a website off of the Facebook platform.
• Offer Posts are for when you want to increase sales in your shops or online, offer a discount or have a
promotion. They are a great way to get people's attention and encourage them to act. With Facebook
Offer Claim ads, you can create and extend timely discounts and promotions to the people you want to
reach and encourage them to shop.
• Event Posts are a feature that lets you organize gatherings, respond to invites and keep up with what your
friends are doing. As a business you can create events to highlight in-store or online activities that you are
planning. Once users agree that they are ’interested’ or ’going’, then they will be notified when you post
updates on your event page.
• Canvases are full-screen, mobile-optimized, post-click experiences that can feature a combination of
images, videos, text and links. You can create a Canvas with the Canvas Builder in Power Editor or Ads
Manager (we’ll cover those tools later), the ’Publishing Tools’ section of your Page and your Page
composer. When you're done, you get a unique URL that you can use in website click and website
conversion ads, mobile app ads, and photo/video page posts. People who tap an ad or post with a Canvas
on their mobile phones or tablets can interact with the Canvas through taps, pans and swipes without
leaving Facebook.
• Video Posts include a native video uploaded directly to Facebook rather than posting a link to a video
from a third party site. A video link offsite would be considered a link post.
• Slideshow Posts can be created for Facebook and Instagram on your mobile phone or using a desktop
computer. Slideshow videos will play on smartphones, tablets and computers just like a video. You can
create a customized, high-quality video without the hassle or expense of video production using
slideshow ads. Combine multiple images, text and sound in your slideshow to capture your audience's
attention and tell a story with photos.
• Photo Posts can be with or without text and include an image, of course.
• Text posts are exactly that, posts with only text.

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So now that you know all of the Facebook Page post types, you might be wondering what an
optimal post looks like. Highly engaged Facebook posts typically are succinct. Attention spans are
shorter than ever, so it’s important to make your point and make it quickly.

Additionally, being topical and relevant is key to engaging your audience in the most impactful
way. You also need to make it clear what you want them to do with the information you’re
sharing, so be sure to include an explicit call-to-action (CTA) to get the most out of your post.

Lastly, including rich media in your post is imperative in order to catch one’s eye in the cluttered
News Feed environment. Posts devoid of photo or video can easily get lost in a scroll, and
Facebook’s algorithm is also optimized to showcase posts that include native photo and video
content.

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Page Insights is a tool that enables you to learn about the types of posts an audience is most
interested in so content can be tailored to maximize audience reach. It also provides information
about your Page's performance, demographic data about your audience and how people are
responding to your posts. You can use Insights to:
• Learn more about the types of posts an audience is most interested in and tailor your content
to maximize audience reach.
• Understand how people are engaging with your Page.
• View metrics about your Page's performance.
• Learn which posts have the most engagement.
• See when your audience is on Facebook.

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There are five considerations to take note of when trying to enhance your brand awareness
activity on Facebook (and Instagram):

1. Capture Attention Quickly: Across all mediums, but especially on mobile, people make fast
decisions around what content they want to engage with. Capturing people’s attention from the
first three seconds is key to keeping their attention to communicate your message.

2. Design for sound off: Knowing that most people will consume video content in mobile feed
without sound, design your video to communicate clearly in this environment. Think about the
person watching video in line in a busy coffee shop; they aren’t likely to want to have sound on,
and even if they did turn on sound it would be hard to hear. Use text overlays and captions to
illustrate the key points of your video’s story.

3. Frame your visual story: People watch videos on mobile just inches from their face and often in
vertical orientation rather than turning their phone to landscape. The way you tell a story visually
matters.

4. Play more: This is the most important consideration. We are still learning what video content
works well in mobile feed and the tactics that make each piece of content successful may be
different. Implement a test-and-learn approach and remain open to optimization always.

5. Edit TVCs: Advertisers should also take note of these when they are using their TV Commercials
(TVCs) for brand awareness on mobile feeds. TV commercials don’t adapt well to mobile, so these

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Now that we’ve established a firm grip on Facebook, let’s move on to Twitter.

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In this section we’ll cover Twitter’s core features, terminology and profile setup. Then we’ll walk
through the qualities of an optimized Tweet and other best practices for marketing on the
platform.

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Twitter is a social network that enables its users to send and read short posts called ‘tweets’ on a
public platform. Part of what differentiates Twitter from the other social platforms is that it is very
conversational in nature due to the fast-paced, real-time dimension of users’ timelines. Twitter
also introduced hashtags to the socialsphere, which made it a great place to discover content.

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Let’s discuss the key terms for marketing on Twitter:

• Profile: A Twitter Profile is the public presence any individual, brand, organization or celebrity
creates in order to communicate and engage with others across the Twitter platform.
• Twitter Bio: A succinct description appearing in your profile that serves to characterize your
personal or brand persona on Twitter. It must be 160 characters or less.
• Tweet: The communication unit on Twitter; it is limited to 280 characters, but they are
considering doubling the length to 280 characters and are currently using specific profiles to
test its efficacy.
• Retweet: A tweet from another user that is shared publicly with your followers.
• Quote Tweets: Retweets with additional comments added (up to 140 characters) before
posting.
• Top Tweets: Those which are most popular or resonant with users, selected by the Twitter
algorithm.
• Reply: A direct response to another user’s tweet which begins with the @ symbol followed by
their username and then your response. Conversation replies are ranked out of interest,
meaning that some replies in a conversation are not shown in chronological order. Replies are
also grouped by sub-conversations to show the best content first, based on several factors
such as interactions and likes.

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Now that we’ve looked at the core features and terminology of Twitter, let’s dive into some of the
more specific features relevant to marketers.

• Direct Messages: Otherwise known as DMs, are private messages supporting text, photos, links,
emojis and tweets, sent between users for one-to-one private conversations, or between
groups of users. By default, Direct Messages can only be sent to users who are following you on
Twitter, but business accounts can opt to receive Direct Messages from anyone.
• Twitter Home Timeline: This is a newsfeed displaying a real-time stream of tweets from
accounts you are following on Twitter in chronological order.
• TweetDeck: A very useful scheduling tool and interface to view multiple timelines/hashtag
searches in one place.
• Geo-tagging: The act of stamping the location details of where a tweet was created which
enables users to search for tweets within a given area. This can be enabled or disabled.
• Moments: These are curated stories showcasing the very best of what’s happening on Twitter,
customized and editable to show the current topics that are popular or relevant to the user.
• Image Descriptions: For visually impaired people, it’s important to have image descriptions
applied to an image. They aren’t visible, but they’re accessible via assistive technology like
screen readers and braille displays.
• Connect: Provides a fast and easy way to connect you to accounts you may be interested in, or
to reconnect you with old friends on Twitter through your device’s address book.
• Mute Words: A feature that allows users to stop receiving notifications for mentions based on
specific words, phrases, usernames, emojis or hashtags.

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Twitter Trend: This is a particular subject or conversation topic that is popular around the globe or a specific area
used to classify tweets on the platform and increase their visibility.
• Twitter Lists: Curated groups of Twitter users, organized by specific topics, interests or
locations.
• Quick Replies: These are prompts with the best ways of replying to a Direct Message, whether
it’s choosing from a list of options or guiding users to enter specific text values.
• Twitter Search: A function that allows users to find tweets related to specific handles, keywords
and hashtags.
• Twitter Notifications: A function that alerts users when their handle has been mentioned,
retweeted or direct messaged.
• Welcome Messages: Messages that greet people and sets expectations as they enter a Direct
Message conversation.
• Twitter Card: An enhanced version of a tweet that enables the attachment of media to tweets
for the purpose of driving traffic to your website. There are four types of cards: the Summary
Card, the Summary Card with Large Image, the App Card and the Player Card.
• Periscope: A live-streaming social app acquired by Twitter which lets users broadcast and
explore the world through live video and social interactions.

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To create a Twitter profile you’ll need a: handle, header photo, profile photo, handle/URL, bio,
location, website, theme color…and, if you’re a person and not a brand, a birthday.

To customize, you must fill in accurate bio information, choose appropriate profile and cover
photos, add location data and your website URL. Being concise and succinct is king on Twitter – be
sure to keep your handle succinct, brand-strong and recognizable and your bio 160 characters or
fewer.

Keep in mind that your Twitter handle is also used as part of the Twitter URL used in promoting
any Twitter presence. As such, your Twitter handle should be succinct, brand-strong and
recognizable.

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An optimized tweet first and foremost should be very concise – you must stay within the
designated character count or your tweet will not be published. Similar to Facebook, your tweet
should be topical and relevant and have an explicit call-to-action. Keep your tweet simple and to
the point for maximum impact.

With regard to hashtags, aim to have no more than two – the more hashtags used, the less space
you have for other commentary and the more spammy your tweet seems. Just like Facebook,
posts with rich media stand out in the Home Timeline, so be sure to include photos, GIFs or a
video in your tweet.

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Now that we know how to craft the optimal tweet, let’s discuss some other best practices for
publishing on Twitter.

1. Take care and pay attention when you’re posting as tweets are un-editable and would need to
be deleted if a mistake is made, losing all accrued engagement.
2. Tweet in response to existing conversations using hashtags to increase discoverability and
visibility.
3. Add geo-location data to your tweets where appropriate to make your message more
relevant.
4. Leverage the Tweet Activity dashboard to track engagement in real-time. You can compare
your tweet activity and followers, and see how they trend over time. Click on any tweet to get
a detailed view of the number of retweets, replies, likes, follows, or clicks it receives, get
detailed insights into who your audience and engagers are and even export your metrics.
5. As mentioned, character real estate on Twitter is crucial – utilize link shorteners to maximize
tweet space.

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50
Now, on to LinkedIn.

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In this section, we’ll cover core platform features and show you how to set up an ‘all-star’ profile.
We’ll then discuss the best ways to build your personal brand and grow a high-quality network on
the platform. LinkedIn offers both personal and company pages, so we’ll explore the different
types of company pages and the best practices for their use. Lastly, we’ll talk about how best to
communicate on LinkedIn and how to optimize posts so they resonate with your target audience.

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Let’s talk LinkedIn! LinkedIn is a B2B-focused social media platform for building

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LinkedIn is a platform that is largely leveraged by business professionals to find new employment or to advance one’s personal
brand. However, marketers can also leverage the platform in a relevant way. Let’s discuss some of the platform’s features that can
help achieve that:
• Connections: People in your network are called connections. Your network is made up of your 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-degree
connections, as well as fellow members of your LinkedIn groups. Your communication options for your extended network vary
based on the degree of connection:
• 1st-degree: People you're directly connected to because you've accepted their invitation to connect, or they've
accepted your invitation. A 1st-degree connection is typically a contact whom you know personally and trust on a
professional level as they are given access to the primary email address on your account. You'll see a 1st-degree icon
next to their name in search results and on their profile. You can contact them by sending a message on LinkedIn.
• 2nd-degree: People who are connected to your 1st-degree connections. You'll see a 2nd-degree icon next to their
name in search results and on their profile. You can send them an invitation by clicking the Connect button on their
profile page, or by contacting them through an InMail.
• 3rd-degree: People who are connected to your 2nd-degree connections. You'll see a 3rd-degree icon next to their
name in search results and on their profile. If their full first and last names are displayed, you can send them an
invitation by clicking Connect. If only the first letter of their last name is displayed, clicking Connect isn't an option
but you can contact them through an InMail.

When inviting members to connect, you should add a personalized message to the recipient to introduce yourself or add context to
your relationship.

• InMail: Private emails on LinkedIn, available only to Premium accounts, sent to fellow professionals without the need of an
introduction, contact information or connections.
• Pulse: An algorithm-driven content engine that delivers insights and news specifically catered to an individual’s networks and
industry interests.
• Premium Accounts: Paid-for subscriptions utilized for the purposes of career progression, recruitment, lead gen, business
insights and learning. Premium Accounts unlock additional features like Premium Career, Sales Navigator, Recruiter Lite and
Premium Business.
• SlideShare: LinkedIn’s content hosting platform that works as a web service, letting you upload presentations, videos,
infographics and PDFs to share with everyone. It is a very convenient way to house all of your brand’s shareable content in one
place.
• Viewed your Profile: A feature which allows you see who has been engaging with your personal profile.
• Referrals: Or the ‘Get Introduced’ feature, are introductions which allow a LinkedIn member to contact 2nd- and 3rd-degree
connections within their network through a mutual connection.
• LinkedIn Group: A page that supports specific, topical discussions moderated by group owners and managers.

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Let’s discuss the attributes of an ‘All-Star’ LinkedIn profile. For starters, a LinkedIn personal profile
is a webpage on which a business professional can detail their career history, education, interests,
skillsets and any other career-related information. In order to be given an ‘All-Star’ profile status
by LinkedIn, you should have most, if not all, of the following:

• A profile picture and cover Photo

• A clear, concise Headline (usually which describes your current role or what you’re looking for)
• Your educational history
• Your location
• A summary of your professional journey

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You also need to show that you’re an active member of the LinkedIn community by sharing
articles and posting any thought leadership or professional updates.

You should detail your career history and showcase your experience, complete with rich media
examples of your work, whether it’s articles, video or a SlideShare.

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And you should solicit endorsements of specific skills from colleagues and credible members of
your industry. Additionally, your profile should feature personalized recommendations from
colleagues.

Do include any relevant courses you’ve taken from prior or continuing education, as well as any
compelling projects that further demonstrate your experience. Be sure to highlight any honors or
awards you’ve received too.

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Profiles should include any additional interests – they can be individuals, businesses, non-profits
and more. Lastly, your Following illustrates which Influencers, Companies, Groups and Schools
you’ve subscribed to updates from, and shows another dimension of your activity on the
platform.

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As previously stated, LinkedIn is a great vehicle to build one’s personal brand. It’s important to
share updates on your LinkedIn Profile as a way to demonstrate thought leadership, provide
relevant news and gain influence on the platform.

You should also join existing Groups and be sure to engage with other members’ posts, incite
commentary with your own discussion topics and even start your own group.

LinkedIn Elevate makes it easy to discover and share content curated by experts at your company.
It’s also a great way to increase the reach and engagement of your thought leadership (boosting
your personal brand) and distribute your company’s news amongst top trending content to
ultimately drive more leads and attract top talent with employee advocacy.

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The power and impact of LinkedIn really lies in your network. It’s necessary to have a high quality
network to access the full potential of LinkedIn.

To do so, you must first connect with relevant contacts, colleagues and alumni. Next, join alumni
groups and other groups related to your industry and interests. Thirdly, be sure to include a link
to your profile in your email signatures to encourage new connections.

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Now that we’ve discussed personal profiles on LinkedIn, let’s dive into the benefits of a Company
Page.

This type of page can be used to tell your company’s story, engage with followers, share career
opportunities, and drive word of mouth at scale.

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To create a Company Page on LinkedIn, go to the ‘Work’ icon on the upper right side and select
‘Create a Company Page’.

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To customize your Company Page you’ll need a:
• Profile picture and cover image.
• Company summary.
• List of specialties.
• Your company’s website URL.
• Your company’s industry.
• The address of your company’s headquarters.
• The size of your company.
• The year your company was founded.

Google previews up to 156 characters of your page text, so be sure that your company summary
leads with powerful, keyword-rich copy. LinkedIn members can also search for companies by
keyword, so include words and phrases that describe your business, expertise and industry focus.

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An affiliate company page is a company page that is linked to another company page that can
represent a separate affiliated, subsidiary or related company, or connect parent and child
brands. Really, there are two main reasons why using an affiliate company page may be
necessary:

1. There are distinct recruiting needs from the parent company page.
2. A team needs to separate page analytics, admins, a distinct hero image, distinct followers and/
or a showcase page.

Alternatively, a showcase page is an extension of your company page, designed for spotlighting a
brand, business unit or initiative with their own dedicated messages and audience segments.

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So what does an optimized LinkedIn post look like?
• In terms of schedule, posting daily company updates is the most effective way to start a
conversation, drive word of mouth, and directly engage with your target audience – but posts
published in the morning usually earn the highest engagement, with a slight bump occurring
again after business hours.
• Short, snappy headlines with thoughtful questions and clear CTAs achieve higher engagement.
• Posts with images or rich media achieve a higher comment rate.
• Links to YouTube videos play directly in the LinkedIn feed, resulting in a higher share rate.

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Now let’s move on to the first of two app-based social platforms, Instagram.

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In this section, we’ll cover the Instagram basics as well as its limitations for marketers. We’ll
examine platform navigation, account types and their benefits. Lastly, we’ll discuss account and
post optimization, and look at a key feature of the platform, Instagram Stories.

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Instagram is a visual platform used to share moments and communicate one’s point of view to
the world.

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While Instagram is a great marketing tool for businesses, it does present a few limitations:

• Once chronological, the content populated in users’ home feed is now algorithmically based on
user behaviors making it difficult to share news that is time-sensitive.
• When posting video content organically, note there is a 60 second time limit.
• Additionally, organic posts don’t offer robust analytics to thoroughly assess engagement and
other performance metrics.
• Organic posts also don’t allow for clickable links, which makes it challenging to drive traffic to
destination outside of Instagram.

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Activity: A newsfeed style feature, divided into ‘Following’ and ‘You’ sections that keeps users up-
to-date on recent activity from people they are following.
Search and Explore: Where content of interest can be discovered from accounts you don't yet
follow.
Instagram Filters: A variety of photographic enhancements that can be applied to content before
publishing.
Instagram Stories: A feature that allows users share ephemeral moments of their day, appearing
together in a slideshow format to create a visual story.
Regram: The act of posting user-generated content (UGC) on your own Instagram page.
Instagram Live: A feature that allows users share live video with their followers and friends on
Instagram.

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For marketers, the ‘You’ section of the Activity feed is a great way to assess what content is
resonating with your followers. Also, depending on who you choose to follow, you can potentially
get great insights on what others are interested in and when they’re active on the platform by
reviewing the ‘Following’ section of the Activity feed.

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Search and Explore on Instagram can be used by marketers to research what type of content is
trending and popular across the entire platform, especially content that is similar to what your
business is posting or engaging with. Consider typing your business name or other keywords
relevant to your business in the search bar to get inspired by other compelling content and
optimize your posts.

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Instagram filters can be used by marketers to make content more visually arresting and
appealing. It’s important to enhance your content in a way that will encourage users to stop
scrolling through their feed and engage with your post.

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Instagram Stories are a great way for marketers to capture live events, share exclusive
promotions, bring followers behind-the-scenes, test new ideas and engage influencers by allowing
them to take over your account.

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Similar to Instagram Stories, Instagram Live is also a great way to capture live events and adds a
greater degree of urgency for followers to engage. However, when you finish broadcasting a live
video on Instagram Stories, you’ll have the option to either share it to your story for 24 hours
before it disappears or discard it immediately. Sharing the live video to your Story can also help
garner additional engagement as live video replays include all the likes and comments from your
original live video. The number of viewers for your live video includes everyone who watched the
live video and the replay.

Another unique and useful feature for Instagram Live is the ability go live with a friend. To do so,
you simply add a guest while you’re broadcasting by tapping the icon on the bottom right and
tapping ‘Add’ to invite anyone who’s currently watching. Once they join, you’ll see the screen split
into two and your friend pop up right below you. Your viewers can still like and comment as they
follow along. You can remove your guest and add someone else at any time, or they can also
choose to exit on their own. This tactic can be used to partner with other brands or collaborate
with influencers in an authentic way.

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As mentioned, hashtags can help marketers to help increase brand recognition, expand their
reach and target new customers. One of the ways to do that on Instagram is by using popular
hashtags like #TBT, #PhotoOfTheDay, #NoFilter, and more. To have better search results for your
brand, use the SEO keywords that are part of your content strategy. Be sure to consistently
monitor what hashtags your community is using to ensure you are on top of trends and their
needs.

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Through your feed or Search and Explore you may come across content that you’d like to regram.
The benefits of regramming are that it can:
• Highlight other content that promotes your business.
• Increase community interaction by showcasing user-generated content and thereby encourage
community engagement by motivating followers to post content worthy of being re-shared.
• Be used to promote content from other Instagram accounts that your business owns.

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If you choose to regram a piece of content, you must exercise the best practices to show good will
to the community.

First and foremost, you should always obtain permission from the owner before reposting their
content. If you’re collecting content from a designated hashtag, be sure to clearly state that the
content could be selected for regramming.

After you’ve obtained permission and begin to post, give credit to the owner by watermarking the
content with their username, tagging their handle to the post, or mentioning their handle in the
post caption. Avoid editing the content with filters or any other customizations other than to give
credit to the owner.

You can also leverage third party tools like Repost app or Repost Whiz, which provide the option
to add an owner credit directly onto the content as well.

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There are two types of accounts you can have on Instagram: Organic and Business

• An Organic Instagram account is more human and familiar to a social media audience and is
able to connect more easily with other accounts.
• Business accounts provide additional post analytics and allow you to utilize paid advertising
and share contact and website information to help drive business results.

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Now let’s explore the benefits of each account in more detail:

Organic accounts
• Allow you to engage and build relationships over time with people interested in your business.
• Easier to be found on Instagram search.
• Ability to respond to comments on ads or posts and move these communications to direct
messages.
• Clickable account name when you use advertising, meaning people can visit your Instagram
account, learn more about your business, view your organic posts and follow your account.

Business Accounts
• Provide increased chances of being discovered through Instagram’s algorithm.
• Users can immediately recognize that you are a business.
• Ability to add contact details, a business address and contact CTA.
• Robust analytics with the insights view: overall impressions, top posts (reach, impressions,
engagement), follower growth, location and demographics.
• Instagram ads within the platform.
• Higher chance of being promoted.

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So how do you create the optimal Instagram account?

Make sure your account name is tied to your business and is under 30 characters. Select a profile
image that is easily recognizable and eye-catching, like your brand’s logo. Write an impactful bio
that conveys your brand message within 150 characters. Click the link in the references below for
a detailed guide on how you can set up an Instagram account.

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Now that you’ve set up your account, let’s discuss the best practices for posting on Instagram:

• Keep captions short and utilize them as a concise way to deliver your message.
• Don’t use more than three hashtags in the caption – three or more will detract from the
simplicity of the post.
• Use pictures with your logo visible on the product/packaging and ensure the image has a
strong focal point so it sends a clear message.
• Post photos/videos of beautiful and unexpected moments that exude authenticity and tell a
story.
• All your posts should share your unique business point of view.

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If you’d like to use more than three hashtags, Hidden Hashtags is a useful technique to make your
posts look cleaner and less spammy. You can hide hashtags by manipulating the number of
characters in your post caption or by inserting line breaks in your caption.

While Instagram allows up to 2,200 characters in a caption, it truncates copy at 125 characters at
which point users will have to click ‘more’ to view the remaining text.

To hide your hashtags, type a caption that is 125 characters then insert line breaks by clicking to
your mobile device’s numeric or special character keyboard, inserting a period or dot symbol,
then pressing return. You can insert multiple line breaks or stop at one and then add your desired
hashtags.

It’s not recommended to exceed ten hashtags as it will detract from your post’s discoverability in
the Instagram algorithm and you may end up ‘shadow banned’. Shadow banning is when posts
from your account stop showing up in searches for specific hashtags on Instagram. It can happen
for a few reasons, but one of the most common is overusing the same hashtag in multiple posts.
So if you’re using the same 20+ hashtags in all your captions, you’re potentially putting your
content’s visibility at risk. Play it safe by sticking to the recommended range and varying up the
hashtags you use.

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• As mentioned previously, it is best practice to obtain permission to use content if you do not
own it.
• Utilizing social influencers is a great way to promote your content and expand your reach.
• Add emojis to your captions to demonstrate authenticity given that Instagram is a mobile-
based social media platform.
• Create a variety of content inclusive of photos and videos and leverage the Instagram sister
apps, Layout and Boomerang, to create additional visual interest.
• Keep your content and posting schedule consistent to give your followers something to look
forward to.
• Include a CTA to encourage a desired action from your audience.

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So as you can see here, the user has clicked the plus (+) icon at the bottom middle of the screen
on the navigation bar, and has been brought to the device’s gallery where they have selected a
photo, applied a filter, then clicked the ‘Edit’ button to further adjust the photo’s brightness,
warmth and highlights before clicking ‘Next’ to add a caption.

The user then pasted a caption that had been previously written, added a geo-location tag, and
then chose to also syndicate the post on Facebook. When the user clicked ‘Share’, the post was
published to their profile and into their followers’ feeds.

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Posting Instagram videos comes with a different set of best practices:
• With videos, it’s important to share your experiences. Show off what’s happening at your
company. Tell your story with video.
• Show the behind-the-scenes (BTS) of events or even use video for real-time events that
highlight community and excitement.
• Create high-quality videos that share a strong point of view. You can use programs like iMovie
or Adobe to create premium videos, then post them to your Instagram account later.
• Be sure to highlight your brand with your story. In 60 seconds, you can include a lot about your
brand’s leaders, messages and product.
• Add hashtags to your video’s captions to make your video more discoverable. For example,
#video has been used over 27 million times, which means that it’s in demand!
• Take the time to select a compelling cover photo to help your video stand out and look nice on
your Instagram page.
• If you have talking points in your video, it’s a good idea to integrate text overlays. Many people
scroll through Instagram news feed while traveling or while in noisy locations, so adding text
helps retain viewers and helps them understand the key takeaways of your video without
sound.

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This video from CNET will walk you through how to create an Instagram Story, add text, filters and
drawings, how to upload photos, videos or boomerangs, and how to generally navigate through
other users’ stories.

Note that before you share a photo or video to your story, you can tap Save at the bottom of the
screen to save it to your phone. You can also save a photo or video you've already shared by
tapping the […] in the bottom right of the photo or video you'd like to save, then tapping Save.
Select Save Photo/Video to save the individual photo or video, or select Save Story to save
everything from your story as a single video.

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As previously discussed, Instagram Stories are a great vehicle to show a raw, authentic side to
your brand as well as using social influencers to assist with reach and credibility. Let’s look at
some additional best practices for creating the optimal Instagram Story:
• Show an authentic side to your brand by sharing photos, interviews and exclusive BTS
content.
• Use social influencers with your content. Have them create Instagram Story takeovers, so you
can use them to their fullest capabilities to grab users’ attention and share messaging points.
• It’s important to use content that is Instagram-centric – do not just repurpose content from
Snapchat.
• One way to achieve that is by leveraging the native Instagram tools to add custom elements to
your content.
• Diversify your Story’s content by adding videos and Boomerangs.
• Add @ mentions that notify and highlight targeted users.
• Include a ‘see more’ link that directs to web content to help drive site traffic and deeper
engagement with your brand.
• Have a clear narrative about any event you’re promoting. For one-off events, make sure you
let your community know what’s happening and the events that are taking place through your
Instagram Story narrative.
• Include a CTA like a promo code or website at the end of your stories for followers to take a
direct, trackable action.

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And now onto the second of our app-based social platforms, Snapchat!

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In this section, we’ll cover key terminology and features, then see how to set up an account. Then
we’ll discuss how to customize Snaps and the qualities of an optimized Snapchat story.

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In the video you just watched, you heard references to Snapchat – so, now let’s dive into what
Snapchat is and how it works.

Snapchat is an image and video messaging, multi-media mobile app that can be used by
marketers for effective, ephemeral storytelling and showcasing products through its vertical video
format.

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As with the other platforms, Snapchat does come with some limitations for marketers:
• Content disappears after 24 hours.
• A high barrier of entry for advertising with Snap Ads starting at $3000/month and more custom
offerings like Sponsored Lenses starting $450,000/day.
• Snapchat is not only a mobile-only app, but it’s also linked to one’s phone number which makes
it a bit more challenging to grow a followership and drive users to content.
• Lastly, the user experience and interface aren’t incredibly intuitive and are somewhat difficult
to understand.

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Here is some of the key terminology used on Snapchat:
Snap: An ephemeral photo or video taken within the Snapchat app that can include text, art,
stickers, filters, bitmoji, etc. and can be displayed for a duration of up to ten seconds.
Snapchat Story: The culmination of photo and video content which disappears in 24 hours, unless
the story is saved in memories or to your phone.
Screenshot: Utilizing your phone’s native screenshot capabilities to capture and store content
from another user/brand, after which the content owner is notified.
Memories: A smart camera roll alternative where you can import your Snaps, search by caption or
recognized objects, creatively embellish and re-share clips and keep sensitive content for ‘My Eyes
Only’.
Our Story: Large community narrative on Snapchat where users submit their content to be
featured in the global story viewable by all users. Snaps you submit to Our Story can show up on
Snap Map or in Search, grouped together with other Snaps from the same location, event, or
about the same topic. Snaps that are submitted to Our Story may be viewable for different
amounts of time — some for only a day or two, while others can be seen for much longer.
Discover: A collection of channels from top publishers who curate content daily.
Lenses: Special effects that are applied in real-time using face detection, allowing users watch
how their facial actions affect the lens on screen.
Data Filter: Information provided by your device, as well as third-party services, to deliver relevant
data such as the temperature, speed, battery life, time, etc.
Snap Map: On the Snap Map, you can view Snaps submitted to Our Story from all across the world
– including sporting events, celebrations, breaking news and more. You and your friends can also
share your locations with one another, and see what’s going on around you.

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The home camera screen allows you to snap photos and videos and then customize with lenses,
filters, drawings, text and more. You can then choose to either send the snap to other users in a
private message, share on your story, or submit to Our Story. Stories are divided into two
sections, those from your friends and featured stories.

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As mentioned previously, Snapchat notifies you when someone takes a screenshot of your photo
or video. The notification appears in your message feed, and as a marketer it is a good way to
know if your content is resonating with your audience – a screenshot indicates that they want to
save and reference your snap in the future.

When you view your Memories, they are separated into categories: individual Snaps, Stories and
your Camera Roll, from which you can upload content. On the All tab, Snaps are shown as
rectangles and Stories are shown as circles.

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Submitting to Our Stories is beneficial to marketers because it:
• Offers more reach by exposing your content to a global audience and more potential followers.
• Allows you to participate in a larger story and share your point of view within a global context.
• Shows you how others around are producing content, helping you to garner key takeaways for
your own content strategy. Then you can see what kind of content gets chosen for a global
audience and use those learnings to create content to be featured.

Discover adds an editorial component to Snapchat. It’s a collection of Publisher Stories updated
daily from top media and content producers to which you can opt in and subscribe to updates
from. Publishers include the Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Mashable, Vogue, Daily Mail,
BuzzFeed, etc. The Discover feature can benefit marketers in the following ways:
• Discover best practices on how to tell a story on Snapchat from an editorial perspective.
Discover content can include quizzes, games, influencer content and much more.
• Learn the advertising offerings on Snapchat as there are many ads in between content on
Discover channels.
• Realize trending content on Snapchat and bring those elements to your strategy. Many times
it’s how-to’s and celebrity content.
• See how media companies are promoting their written content within the Snapchat platform.
Learn how to take long-form content and bring it to the Snapchat platform.

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Lenses provide a fun way to augment your face, voice or environment. Marketers should leverage
them when appropriate to show authenticity and knowledge of the platform. Sponsored Lenses
are also a great way for marketers to engage their audience and showcase new products or
highlight events.

Data filters can be used by marketers to emphasize the time of an event or promotion, show how
a product works in a particular type of weather/temperature and more.

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Custom Stories are collaborative stories that allow multiple Snap accounts to share Snaps
together. There are two types of Custom Stories:

Group Stories: You and users you choose can create new Stories together around a specific
theme.
Geofenced Stories: You can create Stories that you and your friends can add to when you’re at a
specific place.

Here are some key details you should know about Custom Stories:
• Snaps you add to a Custom Story only last for 24 hours.
• A Custom Story can last as long as you and your friends keep adding to it, but will disappear
from your Stories screen if no one adds to it in the last 24 hours.
• You can only create and add to up to three Custom Stories at a time.
• You can keep adding to a Geofenced Story for a few hours after you leave the Geofence.
• Custom Stories can include up to 1,000 Snaps.
• The user who created a Custom Story can save the entire story.
• If the user who created the Custom Story deletes it, all of the Snaps within the story are also
deleted (but they can be saved by the users involved beforehand).

Custom Stories are a great way for marketers to brand company events and engage consumers
and influencers (and their followers) by allowing them to contribute to the story and diversify the
perspectives within the story.

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Snap Map is a great tool to visualize where there is a concentration of people, where your friends
are, or where there is a featured event or place of mass interest. As a marketer, it’s a unique way
to keep track of events and places that matter to your target audience and relevant influencers as
well as view snaps submitted to Our Story.

Snapchat’s universal search can be used to see breaking news and top stories near you, as well as
to browse stories by categories like Animals, Travel, Attractions, Food, Nightclubs and more.
Search makes it very easy for marketers to quickly find content that is relevant to their business
and target audience.

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Community Geofilters: Special overlays that communicate the ‘where and when’ of a Snap in a fun
way, whether sending a Snap to a friend or adding it to a Story.

On-Demand Geofilters: Businesses and individuals can purchase On-Demand Geofilters for their
event, business or a specific location which can include brand logos and trademarks.

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Upon signing up for Snapchat, you’ll be prompted to enter a first and last name and birthday.
After that, you will select a username and password. Then, you’ll enter the device’s phone number
and an email address, and be asked to confirm and verify your account.

Once the account is created, you’ll be asked to add friends, which you can do through your
contact list or via username or Snap Code. After you add a friend, you have the option to remove
or block them by simply tapping on their name in your friend list (accessed by tapping the little
Snap ghost icon or your bitmoji in the upper left corner or from your recent stories list), tapping
‘Settings’ and then ‘Block’.

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Now let’s talk about the qualities of a fully optimized Snap. The best Snaps:
• Include a clear photo that showcases the product and focal point.
• Are entertaining so that consumers stay throughout the story and want to learn more.
• Utilize native Snapchat tools to make it creative and interesting.
• Are part of a large narrative that helps tell a dynamic story.
• Include a link to drive your audience to your website/other social platform.

When creating a caption for your Snap, remember these key things:
• Keep it succinct and to the point
• Ensure it is illustrative of the content you’ve created
• Use colors that accentuate your photo/video
• Use different font sizes to keep your content fun and engaging

Snapchat’s Paperclip function lets you attach a website to a Snap that friends can swipe up to
open in Snapchat’s internal browser. Previously only ad campaigns and Discover content could
include links. Just tap the Paperclip button in the Vertical Toolkit and enter your link.

Marketers can use this function to drive to their company website, share videos, event links, lead
generation pages and more.

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Now that we know the components of an optimized snap, let’s discuss the elements of a Snapchat
story optimized for marketing:
• The best Snapchat stories, obviously, should tell a story.
• The story should use a mixture of photo and video and involve any stakeholders key to your
business or event.
• The story should promote your product.
• Consider having interviews with change makers to make your story more compelling.
• Utilize all of the native filter options – adding geofilters, data filters and color demonstrate
authenticity.
• Overall, your story should be entertaining – don’t overload your story with promo as that could
deter viewership.

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Now that we’ve covered each platform in great detail, let’s move onto Communities.

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In this section, we’ll cover the concept of communities and their importance, then dive into how
you can build and manage an active, loyal community.

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It’s not enough for a social media marketer to amass a huge following. As mentioned in the
beginning of this module, social media marketers are responsible for fostering thriving
communities – social units that create a feeling of fellowship with others as a result of sharing
common attitudes, interest and goals.

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Communities are an important component of social media as they:
• Incite engagement, and every act of engagement brings your users closer to your brand which
increases your brand’s visibility on the platform and attracts more potential customers to your
profiles.
• Create a welcoming, engaged environment that fosters brand affinity and loyalty as community
members will reference your brand as the entity responsible for their positive experience/
growth.
• Are incubators of inspiration because they encourage its members to share their own stories
which can create connections and inspire others to action.
• Foster trust – if you can get your followers to function as a community, it will be a sign that
your brand is trustworthy, and you’ll attract more followers and earn higher retention rates as
a result.
So let’s talk about how to build a community organically:
• Invite your friends: Invite people in your life who may be genuinely interested in your business to like/
follow your account. They can support you by interacting with your posts and sharing your content. This
initial audience helps you establish credibility, build your reputation and spread the word about your
business right away.
• Welcome your customers: Invite people you currently do business with to like/follow your account.
Facebook allows you to upload their email addresses or import your contacts from popular email services
like iCloud, Outlook and Yahoo.
• Add social interaction CTA to website: Such as a Facebook Like button or box to your website. Using the
Facebook Like button allows visitors to like your page without leaving your website. You can also add the
Facebook Like button to ‘Thank You’ pages that appear after someone signs up for your mailing list,
submits a lead form or makes a purchase. Since those visitors have already connected with your business
in one manner, they will likely connect with you on Facebook as well.
• Connect Personal & Business Profiles: Such as a Personal Facebook profile with a Facebook Business Page.
Every employee should add your company as their current employer in their personal profile’s Work
section. When you do, you’ll be linking directly to the company page so others can click over at will. Go to
your personal ‘About’ page and edit your ‘Work and Education’ information. Click ‘Add a Workplace’ and
select your Facebook page as the company. After you enter details about your position, check the ‘I
currently work here’ box and choose the dates as applicable. Make sure the visibility is set to Public and
click Save Changes.
• Use hashtags in posts: As previously mentioned, hashtags are a great way to expose your content to new
audiences. If your content is compelling and engaging, people searching on your post’s hashtags may be
inspired to follow you for more.
• Cross-Promote: Do this on all social platforms and share the links to your other social platforms when
relevant.
• Join Platform groups: Join interest groups that are relevant to your business and share the link to your
page or page content.
• Include link in email signatures: Whenever you send emails to your customers, colleagues, vendors and
other contacts, add links to your social accounts along with your website link.

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Promote at Events: Encourage followership in-store or at events. Consider offering discounts for
new fans/followers too.
Follow other relevant accounts: Following other accounts creates good will amongst users and can
inspire them to follow you in return.
Develop consistent posting schedule: A consistent posting schedule will demonstrate that you’re
reliable and foster trust within your community which creates loyalty. Retention is an important
aspect of community growth – if you don’t have a strategy for keeping the followers you gain, all
your work will be for nothing!
Use emojis & colloquial terms: As mentioned earlier, using emojis and colloquial terms when
relevant shows that you ‘speak the language’ of the community…that you understand them and
want to communicate in a way that is relatable and comfortable. This also fosters affinity.
Respond to follower comments: It’s imperative to respond to your community – if your followers
feel like they’re only being spoken AT and are not being engaged in a conversation, they will
assume that your business is self-serving and doesn’t really care about their customers’ needs.
Responding to your followers also humanizes your brand and increases affinity.
Use GIFS, quote images & memes: Similar to using emojis, GIFs, quote images and memes are the
language of the social media space – when used in a relevant way, your content becomes more
engaging, relatable and shareable, and your brand becomes more likeable.
Offer special promotions to followers: When you offer special promotions to followers, they feel
just that…special. You’re demonstrating that you care about this community and want to reward
them for their loyalty and engagement – this is a classic example of positive reinforcement and
will almost guarantee their continued loyalty and increased brand affinity.

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Take note of these paid methods for building a community on each platform:
• Use Facebook Custom Audiences to target Page ads to email list subscribers, leads, website
visitors, etc.
• Use Facebook Ads Manager to promote updates from your page and links to your website.
• Link your Instagram account to Facebook Business Manager to create Instagram ads with your
handle overlaid on the image and a clear CTA to follow.
• Set up a Followers campaign with Twitter Ads.
• Launch Follower Ads on LinkedIn.
• Launch image/photo ads on other platforms with your SnapCode and Snapchat username to
promote followers and the mobile link to your account.
• Pay relevant influencers to increase awareness of your account by either allowing them to
takeover your account for a set period of time or creating content with a CTA to follow your
brand’s account.

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Now, here are some best practices for managing the community you’ve built:
• Be sure to develop an authentic, consistent brand voice/tone – communities appreciate honesty and
dependability.
• As mentioned previously, responsiveness is key. Your followers should know that you care about
their comments and aren’t only there to promote your brand. Plus, the more you engage with your
followers, the more they feel appreciated and compelled to continue participating. Engagement
creates more engagement.
• In actuality, 80% of the content you share in the community should cater to the interests of your
audience and 20% should be about promoting your business. The 80% should still support ideas and
insights that your brand believes in – again, all content should be authentic. The 20% can promote
your business but also provide value to your audience by including a discount or special offer.
• It could also just include a persuasive CTA that inspires your audience to learn more about your
company so it possibly leads to conversion in the future.
• Consider having recurring topics or post series that fans and followers can look forward to
participating in (and encourage recurring engagement).
• Consider using a personal identifier (initials or first name) with your responses to humanize and
increase affinity, especially with social customer service.
• Pay attention to what posts/content is resonating with your audience (on your owned channels and
competitor channels) and optimize. Again, posts should always provide value to your followers and
not just be in service of the business.

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With organic social media marketing done, let’s move onto paid! When discussing paid social
media marketing, each platform must be approached differently. Now let’s walk through the paid
advertising offerings of each major social platform, as well as the analytics capabilities available
to effectively report on your ad performance.

Upon completion of this section, you will be able to apply social media concepts and best
practices to paid marketing activities on key platforms in order to run successful campaigns that
yield ROI and meet business objectives.

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Let’s begin by examining general concepts for campaign development and management, then
dive into each platform’s specific paid offerings.

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First, we’ll discuss general campaign concepts, starting with how to build a social marketing
campaign and the best practices for campaign development. Then we’ll look at the different types
of campaign objectives and how to align your business goals with the appropriate campaign
objectives and KPIs. Lastly, we’ll explore the different types of campaign metrics and some of the
third party tools available to measure and analyze your campaign.

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Let’s start with the fundamental steps necessary for building a social marketing campaign.
1. First, you must set social media goals which align with your company’s goals – we’ll talk about
how to map your business objectives with social media goals shortly.
2. After you these set these goals, you need to break them down into specific tactics. To do that,
you should consider the objectives and their corresponding KPIs.
3. Once you outline the tactics, you should take time to prioritize your plan – align with your
team what goal is likely to be the most impactful and make that the priority of your campaign.
4. Set timing estimates and assign tasks to your team – it’s important to get your team invested
in the goals and make them accountable for the success of the campaign by assigning tasks.
5. Once the campaign is underway, be sure to analyze and adapt the plan as you go – part of the
beauty of social media is that it provides results much quicker than traditional marketing
tactics like TV or print advertising. Be sure to take advantage of the real-time nature of social
media by reviewing campaign performance regularly and optimizing based on the metrics.

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Here are some additional best practices to consider when you’re developing a campaign:
• Every campaign should have a clearly defined target audience. Knowing your audience is
necessary to create the most resonant creative.
• Your creative should also be designed as mobile-first. Most social media consumption happens
on mobile devices, so it’s important to design content that is best viewed in a mobile
environment.
• The creative should also have branding clearly upfront, but in a subtle way to avoid looking too
promotional.
• It’s ideal to launch your campaign with at least four creative variations so the platform’s
algorithm can optimize against the best performing content.
• As such, you should be updating your creative often to avoid customer fatigue.

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Digital marketing has quickly become part of the fabric of any strong marketing campaign.
Depending on your business goals, your digital campaign can deliver greater impact if you create
a ‘surround sound’ effect with multiple, similar campaigns running simultaneously across multiple
platforms, thereby becoming a cross-platform integrated campaign.

If you’re building a cross-platform integrated campaign, there are some additional best practices
to keep in mind:
• DO NOT syndicate the exact same creative across all platforms – it’s lazy and a surefire way to
stand out negatively as a brand that is unfamiliar with the nuances of each platform and its
audiences.
• DO design creative that is in line with each platform’s best practices, but remember it’s also
helpful to make your content look like ‘matching luggage’ – that is, they all have different sizes
and uses, but they’re part of the same set. This will increase brand recognition and affinity.
• Lastly, make sure the posts you publish on each platform are trackable via platform native or
third party analytic tools so that you can compare their performance.

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When we discussed the steps necessary for building a campaign, the first step was to align your
campaign objectives with your company’s larger business goals. So let’s dive into the different
types of social media objectives. They are:
• Awareness
• Site Traffic
• Purchase
• Lead Generation
• Brand Affinity

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Here’s how each objective aligns with your campaign’s Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. It’s
important to assign KPIs as they are the metrics you will track to understand whether your
campaign is meeting your business goals.

• An objective of building awareness can be tied to reach and impressions, social engagements,
follower growth, views, and app downloads.
• A site traffic objective can be measured by clicks and signups.
• Purchase objectives can also be measured by clicks as well as app downloads.
• If your objective is to generate leads for your business, you can track signups and app
downloads.
• Finally, if your objective is to increase brand affinity, this can be indicated by social
engagements, follower growth, content views, signups and app downloads.

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We’re going to discuss, in-depth, the variety of ways you can analyze campaigns on each social
media platform. But for now, it’s good to understand the difference between vanity metrics and
key metrics. Vanity metrics are social engagements – metrics that are exclusive to social media
and don’t really have meaning unless you tie them to larger business marketing objectives, like
the ones we discussed earlier: awareness, site traffic, lead generation, etc.

Key metrics like click-through rate (CTR), engagement rate and conversion rate are more
actionable and make the efficacy of your social campaign more tangible because they give more
context to your social media return on investment (ROI).

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What tools can you use to track these metrics? There are platform-native analytics that we will
dive into in more detail later, but there are also a few third party tools that you can leverage to
view and analyze campaign performance such as:

• Google Analytics – which measures website traffic and performance.

• Tweet Reach – which measures performance on Twitter.
• Simply Measured – a comprehensive social measurement platform which has free and paid
tools for analyzing all platforms.
• Sprinklr, HootSuite and Buffer – which are community management, social advertising and
post scheduling tools that also offer analytics.

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126
Now that you know the basic principles of campaign setup, let’s dive into each platform’s
individual ad capabilities, beginning with Facebook.

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In this section, we’ll first define what Facebook Ads are and the different types of native ads and
placements available to marketers. We walk through the 3-level structure of Facebook Ad
campaigns, the specific campaign objectives available on the platform and also the CTA buttons.

Next we’ll look at the targeting options and audience insights Facebook offers to marketers. At
this point, you’ll likely be wondering how you create ads on the platform, so of course we’ll then
discuss Facebook’s Ads Manager and Power Editor tools and how ad auctions work.

Lastly, we’ll show you how you can leverage Canvas, a unique customizable ad type, then finish up
with how to analyze your Facebook campaign performance.

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Facebook Ads is the native paid media platform offered and developed on Facebook. Facebook
Ads enable advertisers to target real people across many devices, which allows advertisers to
strategically reach people at each stage of the marketing funnel.

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Facebook provides various ad formats. They include:

• Video Ad: These ads put video front and center in feeds.
• Image Ad: These ads allow you to use static images to highlight the offering.
• Link Ad: These ads allow an advertiser to input a URL that people will visit once they click the
ad.
• Carousel Ad: These allow advertisers to upload multiple images that users can scroll across.

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Dynamic Ad: These ads help you promote relevant products to shoppers browsing your product
catalog on your website or mobile app.

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• ead Ad: These ads allow people on mobile to complete forms with just a couple of taps,
making it incredibly easy for them to send you their information.
• App Ad: Allow advertisers to drive new installs to your app or engage existing users.
• Event Ad: Advertisers can get people to ‘attend’ or respond to their Facebook event.

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• Local Awareness Ad: Local awareness ads from Facebook are a way for businesses to reach
people nearby their business and help them find it.
• Canvas Ad: Canvas is an immersive and expressive experience on Facebook for businesses to
tell their stories and showcase their products.
• Collection Ad: Make it easier for people to discover, browse and purchase products and
offerings in a visual and immersive way.

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Facebook also offers three different placement options for your ads to encourage users to engage
with your objective. They are:
• Desktop News Feed & Mobile News Feed (and Right Hand Side)
• Instagram
• Audience Network (which is collection of third-party apps and mobile websites approved by
Facebook to show Facebook Ads)

The same people can be reached across all placements in the same campaign.

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When creating a Facebook Ad campaign there is a three-level structure:

1. Campaign Level: You begin at the Campaign level, which is where you set your objectives to
determine what you want to accomplish with an ad.
2. Ad Set Level: Then you move on to the Ad Set level where audiences, ad placement locations,
budgets and ad schedules are set.
3. Ad Level: Last comes the Ad level, where you define your campaign creative – this includes the
format, photo or video, the ad copy and any page links.

Within a campaign there can be as many ad sets as you wish. There can also be as many ads as
you wish in an ad set, but best practice would point to there being no more than six ads in an ad
set. Too many ads in an ad set means there are too many ads competing for the same audience
and it will have a negative impact on delivery.

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Now on to Campaign Objectives. We discussed this earlier, but note that Facebook specifically
designs its campaign objective selection around these three particular stages of the Buyer’s
Journey.

• If your aim is Awareness, you should select a brand awareness or reach objective for your
Facebook ad campaign.
• If your aim is Consideration, you can choose from a traffic, engagement, app installs, video
views or lead generation objective.
• If your goal is Conversion, you can select from a conversions, product catalog sales or store
visits objective for your campaign.

Be sure to choose the most appropriate campaign objective in order to achieve your campaign
goals.

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Facebook offers several CTA buttons for marketers to include in their ads. Each CTA specifies a
specific action which should be aligned with your marketing objective.

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Audience targeting helps you show your ads to the people that are most relevant to your message
based on location, demographics and what they do off of Facebook. So, let’s dig into the various
targeting options that Facebook offers.

• Core Audiences: Allows you to target based on location, demographics, age & gender,
connections, interests and behaviors.
• Custom Audiences: An audience you can create made up of your existing customers, which is a
great way to reach out to current customers to upsell or cross-sell, as well as to re-engage
lapsed customers.
• Lookalike Audiences: A way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in a business
because they're similar to customers you care about.
• Partner Categories: Leverages offline data provided by trusted partners that matches to people
on Facebook and Instagram, enabling more relevancy.

By selecting the right targeting options, you can implement a strategy that focuses on reach and
precision at scale, while eliminating waste. For example, a nail salon can reach out to people with
manicure offers in the local area who have an interest in beauty, but exclude anyone who has
bought a manicure from them in the past two years.

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So now you might be wondering what tools you can use to measure the success of your Facebook
Ad campaign.

Audience Insights is a tool native to Facebook that allows you to learn more about audience
engagement and performance metrics from paid campaign activity in order to deliver meaningful
and targeted messages to people.

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Audience Insights aggregates anonymous information about your ad performance such as:

• Demographics: Age, gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role.

• Page Likes: Top pages people like in different categories.
• Location: Top towns/cities, countries, language.
• Activity: Frequency of logging in and through which device.
• Household: Income, ownership, size, market value, spending methods.
• Purchase: Retail spending, online purchases, purchase behavior.

Check out the tutorial for how to navigate Audience Insights in the resources section.

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The information in Audience Insights is aggregated from three different groups of people:
• People on Facebook (the general Facebook audience)
• People connected to your Page or Event
• People in Custom Audiences you’ve already created (an audience made up of your current
customers)

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So where within the Facebook platform do you go to manage your ads? Facebook’s Ads Manager is
a self-serve tool where advertisers can launch and manage their own ad campaigns, define
objectives, targeting and placements, and upload the creative they wish to run. Ads Manager is
the starting point to building campaigns and setting campaigns live on the platform.

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Ads Manager offers many features and settings which include: Marketing Objectives, Campaign
Structures & Planning, Ad Creation & Management, Assets Management, Ads Reporting, and
Billing & Payment Methods.

• Marketing Objectives: These are the various brand and direct response approaches an
advertiser can take and can be found under the ‘Create & Manage’ tab.
• Campaign Structures & Planning: These are the Campaign, Ad Set and Ad levels that allow you
to set the right objective, targeting and creative. This can be found under the ‘Create & Manage’
tab.
• Ad Creation & Management: This is the create flow that lets you build ads across the three
layers. This can be found under the ‘Create & Manage’ tab.
• Assets Management: This is a space that holds your pixels, audiences, product catalogs and
more. This can be found under the ‘Assets’ tab.
• Ads Reporting: This is the interface that allows you to analyze the performance of all
campaigns. This can be found under the ‘Measure & Report’ tab.
• Billing & Payment Methods: Here you can add new payment methods, download invoices and
set spending limits. This can be found under the ‘Settings’ tab.

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Now that you know how to navigate Facebook’s Ads Manager, let’s discuss the best practices to
apply to get the most out of your campaigns:

1. It is vital to align your marketing objectives when selecting them on Ads Manager with the
objectives of the business. If your job is to grow the brand or drive new customers, reach and
awareness objectives should be set. For example, if you are set to get new signups, select Lead
Generation.
2. Always structure your campaign to the audience you select and the desired outcome. If you
are reaching out to new customers, be sure to exclude existing customers in targeting.
3. Strong, impactful copy, imagery and video should be provided for the campaign. The success
of the campaign is strongly influenced by the quality of the creative and its relevancy to the
target audience.
4. As you have seen, there are many ways and permutations with which to reach out to
audiences on the Facebook platforms. Be sure to build precise targeting clusters.
5. There are a few ways to bid on advertising; we will discuss those later in the module.
6. A ‘test, learn and scale’ approach is the best way in which to approach advertising in general,
but particularly on Facebook. It is important to frequently check the performance of
campaigns against metrics that matter to you. Analyze what works and what doesn’t.
Whatever works well, be sure to invest more in it so you can scale success.

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Navigating Ads Manager is really quite simple, it just looks daunting because the tool is so
comprehensive. Check out the tutorial in the resources section to see how to create and edit a
campaign, ad set and ad in Ads Manage., and also how to turn them on and off!

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In addition to Ads Manager, Facebook offers Power Editor, a tool designed for larger advertisers
who need to create lots of ads at once and have precise control of their campaigns.

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The functionality and layout of Power Editor allows marketers to see more live campaigns than
Ads Manager and makes the management of bulk ads, individual ads, ads sets and multiple
campaigns easier with easy tab navigation and high level metrics such as results, reach and
spend.

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In Power Editor, there are slightly different campaign objectives available to advertisers, however
they still ladder up to the same three stages of the marketing funnel:

• Awareness objectives are: Brand Awareness and Reach.

• Consideration objectives are: Site Traffic, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation, Post
Engagement, Page Likes and Event Responses.
• Conversion objectives are: Conversions, Product Catalog Sales and Store Visits.

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Now this video will walk through how Facebook Ad Auctions are designed to bring relevant
content to people while providing maximum value for your advertising budget.

First, a 'total value' is assigned to every ad competing in the auction; your ad competes with
others, and the one with the highest total value wins the auction. The ‘total value’ number is
based on:
• The amount you have bid.
• The likelihood of your ad leading to your desired outcome.
• The quality of your ad.
• The relevance of your ad to a potential viewer.

To make sure your ad is competitive, you’ll need to choose an objective that aligns with your
business goal. Then, bid the maximum amount the ad is worth to your business. Make sure you
set the budget and bid on your ad type so you’re likely to capture at least a few of your desired
actions each day. Low bids tend to result in slow delivery to a small percentage of the selected
audience. High bids tend to result in speedy delivery to a large percentage of the audience, which
is why bidding the maximum amount is recommended.

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To win a spot in an ad auction, the ad has to have the highest ‘total value’. The total value isn't
how much an advertiser is willing to pay to show their ad. It's a combination of the following three
factors:

1. Advertiser Bid (Automatic & Manual): An automatic bid lets the system optimize bid amounts
for you, whereas with manual you are instructing the system what bid level you want to go
for, e.g. €3 per website click.
2. Ad Quality & Relevance: For this second factor, it’s important to get targeting and quality of
creative right in order to win the auction.
3. Estimated Action Rates: The system estimates the likelihood of an audience reacting positively
or negatively to the ad.

Facebook also gives ads a relevance score from 1-10 that is calculated differently depending on
the objective set, based on positive and negative feedback the system expects from the people
seeing it, and also how the ad is performing. Only set live ads that have high relevance scores.

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There are three key components to success when planning or using an existing ad campaign on
the Facebook platform:

1. Creative: The relevance of the creative visuals and copy is vital to the success of the campaign.
If the messaging doesn’t suit the audience, very few will react positively and the ads system
will regard the ad as not interesting for the audience, meaning delivery will get more
expensive.
2. Targeting: Selecting the right audience for your product offering is also vital.
3. Bidding: As mentioned earlier, when you bid for value you get the optimum delivery for your
ads.

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Let’s now look at one of Facebook’s more unique ad types – Canvas. Facebook Canvas is an
immersive and expressive mobile ad experience that businesses can leverage to tell their stories
and showcase their products. Canvas enables you to shorten the distance between your message
and the customer. It loads instantly, is mobile-optimized and is designed to capture the complete
attention of your audience. Canvas ads let people watch engaging videos and photos, swipe
through carousels, tilt to pan and engage with lifestyle images with tagged products – all in a
single ad.

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To create a Canvas ad, use Facebook Canvas Builder and the Canvas management tools within
your page’s Publishing Tools. Marketers can select various components such as video, text and
headers to include in their Canvas. It is recommended that marketers test and learn which
components work best with each other, especially in relation to their marketing objectives.

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Although Canvas ads still follow the same three stages of the Buyer’s Journey, the ad objectives
for Canvas differ from the other Facebook ad types.

• For Awareness, the objective options remain as Brand Awareness and Reach.
• For Consideration, only Traffic, Engagement and Video Views are available.
• And for Conversion, only Conversions can be selected as an objective.

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The Canvas creation process starts with three default components: header, photo and CTA
button. You can move these components using the arrows at the top right of each component’s
box. You can also use the trashcan icon to delete a component from your Canvas (and you always
have the option to add it back). There are additional Canvas components available which include:
carousel, text block and video.

A finished Canvas has its own URL that can also be used within a Facebook Ad for mobile News
Feed.

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It’s worth noting that Canvas also has some reporting metrics that are unique to it. The added
metrics Canvas has are:

• Canvas View Duration: The average total time, in seconds, that people spent viewing a
Facebook Canvas.
• Canvas View Percentage: The average percentage of the Facebook Canvas that people saw.
• Link Clicks: The number of clicks on links to select destinations or experiences, on or off
Facebook-owned properties.
• Canvas Component Duration Percentage: The average percentage of time spent viewing each
component of a Facebook Canvas.
• Outbound Clicks: The number of clicks on links that take people off Facebook-owned
properties.

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Ad reporting and analysis is crucial to understanding how well ads are performing
and allows marketers make changes in real time to live ads to enhance their
performance.

The best place to see how your ads are performing is the reports area of Ads
Manager. Here you can create and export Facebook ad reports to see your most
important ad metrics and learn how you're reaching your business goals. Ads
Manager can also break down the performance of each campaign to date across
all metrics, which are updated in real time.

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The following are the metrics you can report on within Ads Manager. Each report can be configured by date
range, account, campaign or individual ad:

• Responder Demographics: These reports show which users are viewing/interacting with the ad.
• Responder Profile: These reports show user interests, ranks and clickers.
• Placement Based Metrics: This shows the breakdown of results by placement (example: Facebook desktop
News Feed, Instagram mobile News Feed) where your ad was shown.
• Facebook Page Actions: These reports show Pages action activity that happens as a result of your ad. This
includes: Post Engagement, Page Likes, Check-ins, Page Mentions, Page Tab Views and Event Responses.
• Video Actions: This report shows engagements (views, likes, comments and shares), retention and clicks
(clicks to play, link clicks and other clicks) on your video.
• Website Conversions: This report measures ads’ ability to drive online conversions, offline sales and in-
store visits (via a pixel). This includes: Website Conversions, Website Checkouts, Website Registrations,
Website Leads, Website Key Page Views, Website Adds to Cart and other website conversions.
• Cross-Device: To enable the cross-device reports, you need to install the Facebook pixel on your mobile
and desktop websites and select the Facebook pixel or App Events in your ads. If you're using the
Facebook SDK, you can also install the Facebook SDK into your mobile app and configure the app events.
• App Actions: This report measures app actions including Desktop and Mobile App Installs, Desktop App
Engagement, Desktop App Story Engagement, Desktop App Uses, Credit Spends, Mobile App Sessions,
Mobile App Registrations Completed, Mobile App Content Views, Mobile App Searches, Mobile App
Ratings Submitted, Mobile App Tutorials Completed, Mobile App Adds to Cart, Mobile App Adds to
Wishlist, Mobile App Checkouts Initiated, Mobile App Adds of Payment Info, Mobile App Purchases, Mobile
App Levels Completed, Mobile App Achievements Unlocked, Mobile App Credits Spent and more.

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159
So now that we know all about how to launch, manage and report on an ad campaign on
Facebook, let’s move on to Twitter.

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In this section, we’ll explore Twitter’s native Ads Manager and the various benefits of running an
ad campaign on Twitter. We’ll show you how to customize your ads dashboard and how to share
or restrict access to the dashboard’s data. Next, we’ll define all the ad formats available on Twitter
and how to create ads on-the-go from your top performing tweets using Quick Promote.

After that, we’ll dive into the different campaign objectives on Twitter and their benefits, best
practices and formats, followed by an illustration of how to map your objectives with the right
KPIs. Next, we’ll discuss Twitter’s targeting options and their ad auction’s bidding model, then how
to optimize your campaign through creative, targeting and bidding.

Finally, we’ll see how to analyze your campaigns using the various Twitter Analytics dashboards
for tweet activity, audience insights and campaign level metrics and data.

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Twitter Ads is the paid media platform offered and developed on Twitter. Twitter Ads objective-
based campaigns are designed to help you achieve results that drive action and add value to your
business. Twitter Ads can help businesses:

• Grow a social following.

• Increase site traffic and sales.
• Grow content engagement.
• Increase video views.
• Increase app installs.
• Generate app re-engagement.
• Develop brand awareness.

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Twitter Ads Manager is a central workspace to plan, manage and report on campaigns so
marketers can easily view and optimize performance at multiple levels – campaigns, ad groups, or
promoted tweets and other ads.

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Note that the Twitter Ads Manager dashboard can be customized to improve metrics visibility and
focus using filters. At the campaign, ad group and ads levels, click on the ‘Metrics: Summary’ drop
down at the top of the chart to select the metric you want to visualize. You can customize the list
of metrics too by selecting the ‘Customize Metrics’ option within the same drop down menu.

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If you’re working with an agency or different marketing teams for the same Twitter account, you
might want to control who has access to it and what their permission level should be, e.g. Account
administrator, Ad manager or Analyst.

This can be done by clicking your account name in the top right hand corner of your dashboard
and selecting ‘Edit access to account’ from the drop down menu.

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Let’s take a look at each of Twitter’s ad formats:

Promoted Tweet: An existing or newly created tweet promoted to a large, targeted group of people.
Promoted Trends: A time-, context- and event-sensitive trend promoted by an advertiser placed at the
top of the Trending Topics list on Twitter clearly marked as ‘Promoted’.
First View: An exclusive ownership of Twitter’s most valuable advertising real estate for a 24-hour
period. When users first visit the Twitter app, or log in to Twitter.com, the top ad slot in the timelines
will be a Promoted Video from a brand who bought the First View on that day.
Promoted Accounts: Suggested accounts that people don’t currently follow that will appear in the user
Home Timeline as a tweet, or as a recommendation in the ‘Who to Follow’ section and search results.
Website Card: A Promoted Tweet format used to drive website visits or conversions, showcase an
image and give a website preview with a short description.
Image & Video App Card: A Promoted Tweet format used to drive app installs or re-engagement. It
showcases an image or video, your app description and a CTA button linking to your app on the App
Store/Play Store, or a specific deep link within your app.
Lead Gen Card: A Promoted Tweet that allows Twitter users to quickly and securely share their email
address with you.
Conversational Card: A Promoted Tweet format used to create engagement, which showcases
compelling images or videos, and up to four CTA buttons with customizable hashtags prompting users
to spread your message to their followers by choosing one hashtag.
Instant Unlock Card: A Promoted Tweet format building on a Conversational Card which prompts users
to tweet by offering access to exclusive content (e.g. a film trailer or an exclusive Q&A) after the tweet
is sent.
Promoted Moments: A Promoted Tweet format including a Moment Card leading to a brand moment.
Promoted Videos: A Promoted Tweet format used to increase video views and engagement which

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Twitter’s Quick Promote is a method of easily promoting your best performing tweets to a larger
audience in a few simple clicks from your Twitter profile. It provides three key benefits to
marketers:

1. A fast way to promote a tweet without using the regular Twitter ad workflow.
2. An on-the-go option to create and promote tweets outside your work environment.
3. A reactive initiative when one of your tweets is performing and there is an opportunity for you
to reach a broader audience.

This video is a great guide on how to use the Quick Promote feature.

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Campaigns can be created based on their specific marketing objectives using Twitter Ads
Manager. You will then be prompted to select your audience, set your budget and choose your
creatives before setting your campaign live. The different campaign objectives available on
Twitter Ads Manager include:

• Tweet Engagement
• Video Views
• Website Clicks & Conversions
• App Installs or Re-engagements
• Followers
• Leads on Twitter
• Awareness

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Awareness campaigns on Twitter help you reach new customers, reinforce your positioning and
drive new users to your Twitter account, website, blog, etc.

When it comes to best practices for awareness campaigns, take note of the following:
• Select ‘Optimize your campaign for maximum reach’ in the budget setup.
• Focus on your brand message and not a specific offer.
• Leverage influencers, brand events and existing brand campaigns.

The most suited and engaging formats for Awareness campaigns on Twitter include:
• Images, GIFs, Scratchreels
• Poll cards
• Conversational Cards
• Instant unlock
• Videos
• Promoted Moments

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A Followers campaign on Twitter helps grow your followers base, build your community and
increase brand recognition, brand awareness and word of mouth.

When it comes to best practices for Followers campaigns, take note of the following:
• Include ‘Follow us’ in your tweet.
• Inform the user of why they should follow you.
• Craft a clear bio and use a professional background image on your profile.
• Avoid extra links that distract from the Follow button.
• Avoid excessive hashtags that may distract users from following.

A Promoted Account is the most suited and engaging format for a Followers campaign.

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A Tweet Engagement campaign on Twitter is particularly useful for the following reasons:
• Promotes your tweets to a large, targeted group of people.
• Places your best content in front of the audience that matters to you, at the time it will have
most effect.
• People can retweet, reply, like your Promoted Tweets, etc.
• Promoted tweets appear in Timelines, on profile pages and on tweet detail pages.

When it comes to best practices for Tweet Engagement campaigns, take note of the following:
• Produce compelling tweets to promote.
• Start conversations with customers.
• Encourage discussion around your new products or services.
• Develop your content strategy and plan your editorial calendar.

Poll cards, conversational cards, instant unlocks, scratchreels, GIFs and images are all formats
most suited to a Tweet Engagement campaign.

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With Video Views campaigns, marketers find them useful as they:
• Increase video views.
• Create engagement with your video content.
• Provide insights on your video performance.
• Use the top growing media in digital advertising, in terms of user consumption.

When it comes to best practices for Video Views campaigns, take note of the following:
• Make a human first impression to draw consumers in.
• Highlight how your product delivers value to increase recall.
• Structure storytelling to drive purchase intent.
• Serve up high-energy entertainment for engagement.
• Use influencers to drive earned media value from their large, engaged following.
• Capture attention quickly – human attention spans are now less than that of a goldfish, tapping out at eight
seconds!
• Design for sound off – content is consumed mostly on mobile without sound, so you must design your video to
communicate clearly in this environment. The person watching a video in a busy coffee shop isn’t likely to have
their sound turned on, and even if they did, it would be hard to hear. Use text overlays and captions to illustrate
the key points of your video’s story.
• Frame your visual story – again, people are watching videos on mobile just inches from their face and often in
vertical orientation rather than turning their phone to landscape. The way you visually frame your story
matters.
• Include a resolution – good video storytelling consists of a beginning, a middle and an end. Give your audience a
chance to get to know your characters, introduce the main conflict in the story and always show a resolution. A
complete story arc is necessary to engage your viewers and keep them coming back for more, instead of turning
their focus elsewhere.
• Think about brand presence – give your brand a visually subtle role that is still impactful to the resolution of the
story.

For engaging Video Views campaigns, try using TV commercials, Periscopes, niche created videos and amplify
formats.

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Website clicks and conversions campaigns are great for driving traffic to your website, driving
conversions across devices and tracking and optimizing the user conversion path.

When it comes to best practices for website clicks and conversions campaigns, take note of the
following:
• Send users to a destination where they can take an action.
• Minimize distractions by focusing the user on your desired action by avoiding @handles,
hashtags or competing CTAs.
• Convey a sense of urgency. Why should people visit your site right now?
• Deliver an offer.
• Experiment with symbols and numbers.
• Check that your landing page is mobile friendly and consistent with the message in your tweet.
• Develop a cadence of refreshing new tweets.

Website cards and media with a link are the most suited formats for this type of campaign.

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Marketers who wish to grow their app audience, re-engage existing users and reach a mobile first
engaged audience should choose app installs & re-engagement campaigns.

When it comes to best practices for app installs & re-engagement campaigns, take note of the
following:
• Explain what your app does.
• Describe what the user will get from your app to set the user’s expectations.
• Convey a sense of urgency.
• Call out the place when using geo targeting.
• Use city specific terms like ‘bean town’, ‘windy city’, etc. when targeting specific cities/areas.
• Experiment with capitalization and punctuation.
• Display screen shots from your app.
• Include text in the image to reinforce your message.
• Include text such as ‘Free’, ‘Optimized for iPhone ’, etc. to emphasize the key selling point.
• Align specific imagery with specific targeting.
• Use color contrast to catch the user’s eye.

Use image and video app formats for this type of campaign.

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And finally, for those who wish to get leads, grow their email lists and newsletter audiences, try a
Leads campaign.

When it comes to best practices for Leads campaigns, take note of the following:
• Create new campaigns that are exclusive to the offer you are generating leads for.
• Include words like ‘get’, ‘sign’, ‘enter’, ‘receive’, find and ‘win’, etc. to inspire action from your
target audience and exclude words like ‘exclusive’ or ‘compelling’.
• Use a short description and include a clear CTA.
• Try between 5-7 different cards across 20-30 variations of a tweet copy.
• Make sure you include your brand name and/or logo in the banner creative of your Lead
Generation Card.
• Make sure your tweet copy matches the offer or content in your Lead Generation Card.
• Follow up with leads after they submit their contact information.

The most suited and engaging format for a leads campaign is, of course, a Lead Generation Card.

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As previously mentioned, after you define your objectives, it’s important to map your objectives to
the right KPIs – especially those metrics related to spend. This makes the value and ROI of your
social campaign more tangible to business leadership. Take note of the meanings of each of these
metric abbreviations:

• CPM = Cost per Thousand (impressions)

• CPF = Cost per Follow
• CPE = Cost per Engagement
• CPV = Cost per View
• CPC = Cost per Click
• CPI = Cost per Install
• CPL = Cost per Lead

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It’s important to know all of the demographic information that Twitter collects and offers as
targeting options to deliver user-centric paid media content campaigns. Selecting the appropriate
demographic targeting that is relevant to your campaign objective is essential for the success of
the campaign.

Just like with Facebook, you can implement a targeting strategy on Twitter that focuses on reach
and precision, while eliminating waste.

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Twitter Ads prices are based on an auction model ensuring marketers achieve optimal results
while creating the best possible experience for users. There are three bidding models available:

1. Automatic bidding: Enables Twitter to auto-optimize bids for a given campaign objective and
budget on the advertiser’s behalf.
2. Maximum bidding: Allows users to manually select how much a lead, click or engagement is
worth to their business.
3. Target bidding: Provides users the ability to average out a specific price per engagement.

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Twitter campaign optimization is something that must be done in order to yield successful
outcomes. You should test different tweets, formats, targeting, etc. to find out what works best
for your business and audience. Experiment with several campaigns for each marketing initiative
and endeavor to learn more about which targeting and creative types perform best.

When we talk about Twitter campaign optimization, there are three key areas you should focus
on: Creative, Targeting and Bid/Budget. Let’s start with the key actions you need to take in order
to optimize your creative:

• Be transparent and clear about what you’re offering, what your product is and what users can
gain by engaging with your ad.
• Have a strong CTA that clearly explains what the user can expect by engaging with your ad.
• Convey a sense of urgency. Why should users visit your site now? Is there a limited time offer?
• Include some sort of rich media. Use relevant and engaging images for more compelling
creatives.
• Ask a question in your tweet copy. It helps users feel like they’re part of a conversation and can
compel them to engage with your ad.
• Test different creatives, select the most successful and increase your bid on this creative to
maximize success.

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In order to fully optimize your Twitter targeting, take note of the following:
• Increase reach: Target users who are similar to your followers, users who are Tweeting with
specific keywords, and users who have visited your website.
• Align tweet copy with targeting: For example, if you have one tweet copy targeting males, and
one targeting females, make sure the copy you use aligns with the different targeting
parameters.
• Run separate mobile campaigns: Mobile is a fundamentally different medium than desktop,
characterized by frequent quick sessions and spur-of-the-moment spikes in purchase intent. As
such, conversion rates may differ on mobile vs. desktop. Because of these differences, it’s best
to run separate campaigns on mobile and desktop. This will allow you test and learn the user’s
behaviors and make specific, informed campaign changes (e.g. creative or bid changes). Mobile
vs. desktop should be your first split in all of your split tests. You may also want to further
break out mobile to phone vs. tablet.
• Don’t target the same users in multiple campaigns: Performance can suffer because you are
essentially competing against yourself.
• Pause under-performing campaigns: Twitter’s Ad Manager gives you the ability to pause
campaigns that are missing the mark on targeting, bidding and creative strategy.
• Remove under-performing keywords, interests and handles: Replace them with those that are
similar to high performing keywords, interests and handles.
• Test campaigns: One of the most important things you can do to drive continued campaign
performance is to optimize and test your campaigns. While it makes sense to run always-on
campaigns, you may want to continually refresh and optimize your campaigns, given Twitter’s
ever-changing, real-time nature.

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Finally, to optimize your bidding on Twitter, be aware of each of the following:

• You may have to increase your bid for more competitive targeting.
• Lower bids make it difficult to serve your ads and the engagements you receive may not be
from the audience you were hoping to reach.
• The best way to maximize a limited budget would be to use the suggested bid or auto-bid
options.
• Modify your bids for campaigns that are not quite meeting your goals.

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Twitter Analytics is a selection of tools to analyze your tweets and understand your followers.
Within it, there are three main areas to focus your attention: Account Home, the Tweet Activity
dashboard and the Audience Insight dashboard.

Account Home provides a summary of account activity that provides a 28-day summary for
tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, followers and tweets linking to your website (if
you are using Twitter Cards). A monthly summary also provides the same information for any
given month.
It also provides detailed information on how your account is performing, how far you’ve
progressed and helpful tips on how to improve your account strategy.

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The Tweet Activity Dashboard is the interface displaying tweet data such as
impressions, hashtag clicks, app opens, link clicks, retweet, replies, likes, share,
for both paid and organic tweets and content.

The dashboard is separated into four sections: Tweets, Top Tweets, Tweets and Replies, and
Promoted; these can help you see how people engage with your tweets in real time, compare your
tweet activity and followers, and see how they trend over time.

You can click on any tweet to get a detailed view of the number of retweets, replies, likes, follows
or clicks it has received. You can also get detailed insights into who your audience is, especially
those who engage with your tweets and can download your tweet metrics for reporting purposes.

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The Audience Insights Dashboard provides you with a real-time look at the people who are most
relevant to you, such as your followers or people who have engaged with your tweets. You can
learn about your audience’s demographics, interests, lifestyle and purchase behaviors — and
leverage these insights to create the most relevant messages and help you identify new audiences
to reach out to.

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The Campaign Dashboard is found within Twitter Ads Manager and is the place you should go to
in order to gather your campaign data. When you open the advertiser interface on
ads.twitter.com, you will first be directed to the Campaign Dashboard. The main dashboard
defaults to the Summary Tab, showing total impressions across all campaigns for the specified
date range. You can also view by Engagements, Spend and Conversions.

Data can be filtered by delivery, spend, campaign settings or campaign objectives. You can export
and share your campaign data here too.

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With Facebook and Twitter now covered, let’s jump into LinkedIn!

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In this section, we’ll discuss the inner workings of LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, including the
different ad formats available for marketers. We’ll next dive into each ad format in detail starting
with Text Ads, then Sponsored Content, Display and Sponsored InMails, and talk through the
available placement options, key elements and best practices. We’ll finish up by discussing
LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities and analytics.

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Campaign Manager is LinkedIn’s self-serve platform that allows advertisers to deliver highly
relevant, targeted messages to unique audiences.

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The primary uses for Campaign Manager are to:

• Create, manage and edit ads and campaigns.

• Track your ad performance: impressions, clicks, CTR, social actions, engagement, CPC, CPM and
total spend.
• Track social actions on ads: likes, comments, shares, follows and other clicks.
• Track your ad budget: daily budget, total budget, bid and duration.
• Analyze advertising demographics.

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There are four ad formats available on LinkedIn to nurture and acquire a specific target audience:

1. Text Ads: Direct response focused advertisements that help generate new leads or potential
customers for your company.
2. Sponsored Content: An ad type that increases the reach of company posts from beyond the
organic following of the company.
3. Sponsored InMail: Allows a company to send, on a mass scale, personalized messages directly
to the inbox of their target audience.
4. Dynamic Ads: Allows you to precisely target decision-makers and influencers with highly
relevant and customizable creative. You can craft your ad copy, choose your CTA and leverage
dynamically generated images from LinkedIn member profiles.

You should note that only Text Ads, Sponsored Content ads and Sponsored InMails can be created
and managed through Campaign Manager. If you want to create a Dynamic Ad, you will have to go
through Marketing Solutions – LinkedIn’s internal account management team.

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On LinkedIn, Text Ads can appear on the Homepage, Profile pages, Search results pages, Groups
pages, within the LinkedIn inbox, on the ‘People You May Know’ page and the ‘Who's Viewed My
Profile’ page.

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With Text Ads, the objective is to generate leads, with results focused mainly on click-through rate
(CTR). When you go to Campaign Manager, select ‘Text Ads’. Then create one by completing these
four key elements:

A. Link: You can choose your landing page and destination URL. Some options to link to are your
pages on LinkedIn (Company Page or Career Page) or your website outside of LinkedIn.
B. Headline: You can have up to 25 characters and they should be short and snappy. An
attention-grabbing headline entices a reader to read further. Here are some headline styles
you could use:
- Ask a question that sparks thought (e.g. "Want to get ahead?“).
- Be direct (e.g. "Get 30% off today“).
- How to (e.g. “How to write a great ad“).
- Command (e.g. "Get ahead with an MBA“).
C. Description: These can be up to 75 characters long. Descriptions should give your reader a
compelling reason to click your ad with a strong CTA. Examples include: “Sign up to learn
more”, “Download our e-book today”, “Send me the video!”.
D. Image: These are optional, but Text Ads with images get up to 20% more clicks. If you choose
to use one, image dimensions must be 50x50.

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Here are some of the main benefits of LinkedIn Sponsored Content Ads:

• Support investment put into content creation by distributing it directly to the audience that it
was intended for.
• Encourage community engagement with prospects on the LinkedIn Company Page.
• Direct Sponsored Content: Effective distribution of language/region based content or industry-
specific solutions without affecting the brand’s overall communications.
• Position the company as thought leaders by boosting the reach of high-quality content to
prospects.
• Increase visibility amongst prospects.

Sponsored Content Ads can appear in the homepage feed of members in your target audience, on
desktop and most mobile and tablet devices.

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Let’s look at how you can create a successful campaign on LinkedIn:

• Select objective: When starting out with a Sponsored Content Ad campaign, you first have to
choose an objective. Choices are: ‘Send people to your website or content’ or ‘Collect leads
using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms’.
• Choose your content: Start by sponsoring an organic update recently published to your
LinkedIn Company Page.
• Target your audience: By location, company, industry, title, skills, degree of study and more.
• Set your bid: And also your campaign budget by CPC or CPM.
• Launch your campaign: And start promoting your content right in the LinkedIn feed.
• Measure your results: Track key metrics including clicks, impressions and engagement with
your content.
• Optimize your impact: Test variations of your content and target audiences using scalable
campaign management tools.

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For marketers, Sponsored InMails are great for supporting inbound lead generation goals and
sales teams, boosting registration for events/seminars/webinars/open evenings, content
downloads, increasing website traffic and supporting any other CTA/ direct response style
marketing. Let’s look at how Sponsored InMails differ from regular InMails:

• CTA Button: Appearing within the InMail.

• Branding/Image: Can appear on the right hand side of the InMail.
• Real Time Deliverability: Sent out only when a user is engaged on LinkedIn.
• Once every 60 days: Exclusive access to target audience/not considered spam.
• Unlimited InMails per Campaign: Not restricted to 40/50 a month.

Another advantage of using Sponsored InMail is that you can achieve direct response from your
target audience at scale.

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Here are the key elements required to run a successful Sponsored InMail in Campaign Planner:

• Sender: Sponsored InMails should be addressed from a credible person that your target audience
will trust. Ensuring your sender has a profile image will set your campaign up for success. It’s also
important that the sender be contextually relevant to your message. The requested sender must be
a first degree connection. It may take some time for a sender to accept your request, so using
yourself as a default sender will enable you to set up the creative and save it as a draft.
• Subject Line: Subject lines with a clear value or opportunity to connect work best. Consider wording
such as ‘Exclusive invitation, ‘Opportunities,’ and ‘Connect.’
• Custom greeting: To insert a custom greeting, type your salutation, e.g. ‘Hello’ or ‘Hi’, and
add %FIRSTNAME%, %LASTNAME% to dynamically insert the member's first name and last name
(for example, Hi %FIRSTNAME%, will appear as Hi Jane, for the member receiving the Sponsored
InMail).
• Banner Image: A banner image on Sponsored InMails provides additional promotional value to your
creative. The banner image automatically redirects to your chosen landing page if the recipient
clicks on the image. Banner images are optional but if you don’t include one, ads from other
advertisers may appear in that slot.
• Body: The best Sponsored InMails are brief, relevant and conversational. Keep your message copy
under 1,000 characters as your content is now part of the member’s messaging experience. Avoid
formatting overload.
• Custom CTA button: A clear CTA gets clicks and conversions. Try top performing CTAs like ‘Try,’
‘Register,’ ‘Reserve,’ and ‘Join’. Additionally, always make sure to include a 300x250 companion
banner with your InMail.

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When it comes to targeting an audience on LinkedIn, there are plenty of options. The only mandatory targeting
option is Location, so once you've chosen your geographic location(s), it is recommended that you add no more
than two of the targeting facets below to improve the scale of your campaign. Here is some more insight into each
of the targeting options:

• Location (required field): Geographic location is based on location specified by the member or the IP address
location.
• Company Name: The organization a member lists as his or her employer. These are based on LinkedIn Company
Pages, which are maintained by company employees.
• Company Industry: The primary industry of the company where the member is employed.
• Company Size: Allows you to reach members based on the size of the organization in which they work. Company
size is determined by the number of employees listed on the organization's Company Page.
• Company Connections: Allows you to reach the 1st-degree connections of employees at companies you select.
This is only available for companies with more than 500 employees.
• Followers: Allows you to target your own Company Page followers. To use this targeting facet, your Ads account
must be associated with your Company Page. When not using this facet, by default your campaigns may reach
both followers and non-followers.
• Job Title: When members update their LinkedIn profiles with new roles, these job titles are grouped by
LinkedIn's algorithms and organized into standardized titles.
• Job Function: This is based on standardized groupings of the job titles entered by LinkedIn members.
• Job Seniority: Describes the rank and influence of a member's current role in their organization.
• Schools: The school, college, university or other learning institution where a member completed a course.
• Fields of Study: The major or area of study within a member's degree. Standardized from member-entered
degrees.
• Degrees: Recognized ranks granted by a college, university or other learning institution.
• Skills: Highly relevant keywords found within a member's profile and skills section that indicate expertise in a
particular area. This includes member-entered skills in the ‘Skills & Endorsements’ section on their profile, skills
mentioned in their profile text, or inferred skills based on their listed skills.
• Groups: LinkedIn Groups where members who share interests or professional associations can gather, discover
new information and ask questions.
• Gender: Determination of whether a member is female or male is inferred based on member profile
information.
• Age: An estimation of how old a member is based on their profile information.
• Years of Experience: Allows you to reach a target audience based on the years of professional experience
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In order to help meet your campaign objectives on LinkedIn, take note of the following best
practices:

1. Determine exactly who you want to target: If you have multiple target audiences, separate
them into different groups and create campaigns tailored to reach each specific audience.
2. Create focused targeting criteria: When creating campaigns, use only a few targeting options
at a time. Most successful campaigns have an audience range between 60K - 400K.
3. Set an aggressive maximum bid: Give your campaigns a higher chance of success by ensuring
that you have a competitive bid.
4. Always use an image: Clear, bright images of business professionals make your ads more
personal and appealing to potential clients.
5. Use a strong CTA: Ads with a strong CTA, such as ‘Register Now!’ or ‘Sign-up Today!’, perform
better.

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6. Create multiple ad variations for each campaign: Use 2-3 active ad variations per campaign to
show variety to your audience while also allowing you to see which strategy is most successful
(A/B testing).
7. Address your audience directly: Grab your audience’s attention by calling out to your audience
in the headline (e.g. ‘Attn: High-Tech Managers’ or ‘Are You an IT Director?’).
8. Keep ads & targeting relevant: The LinkedIn system serves relevant ads more often and limits
ads that rarely get clicks.
9. Turn off low-performing ads: Active ads with a low CTR can weigh down a campaign and lead
to a drop in impressions.
10. Recognize the impact of small changes: Even simple changes, such as adjusting targeting,
raising bids and refreshing/creating ad variations, can improve your performance.

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Company Page Analytics is LinkedIn’s native reporting tool which can be used to gain deeper insights into
a Company Page’s performance. It’s important to note that only Company Page administrators can access
the Analytics page. Check out the link in the references for details on how you can become a Company
Page administrator. Company Page Analytics is particularly useful for marketers because it helps:

• Evaluate engagement of your individual posts.

• Identify trends across key metrics.
• Understand more about your follower demographics and sources.
• Understand more about your page traffic and activity.

There are three main sections within this tool: Visitors, Updates and Followers; each can be accessed by
clicking the ‘Analytics’ dropdown at the top of the page.

Let’s start by looking at the Visitors section. Here you can control the time period the data covers by
selecting the timeframe dropdown next to ’Visitors’ in the upper left corner of the page. There are two
types of Visitor analytics you can track in the admin center:

1. Traffic Metrics: Displays key metrics based on traffic to your company page. You can view metrics for
unique visitors or page views over time by clicking the ‘Page views’ dropdown in the upper left corner
of the page.
2. Visitor Demographics: Displays a breakdown of who is following your company using five types of
demographic data. Use the dropdown menu to the right of ’Visitor demographics’ to filter by job
function, country, region, seniority, industry and company size. This section can help you identify
audiences you want to grow with demographic information to more effectively target company
updates.

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In the ‘Updates’ section of Company Page Analytics, there are three types of data you can track:

1. Engagement Highlights: Displays the number of total likes, comments, shares and new follows
in the last 30 days. It also indicates the percent change from the previous 30 days.
2. Engagement Metrics: Displays key metrics for your Organic and Sponsored Content over time.
Use the dropdown menu to the right of ’Engagement metrics’ to filter by Impressions, Unique
Impressions, Clicks, Likes, Comments, Shares, Followers Acquired and Social Engagement
Percentage.
3. Update Engagement: Displays engagement updates by individual update. You can view the
following metrics for each update posted to your Company Page: Update Name, Date, Target
Audience, Sponsorship, Follows Acquired, Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Social Actions and
Engagement.

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And finally, the Followers section. Here, there are four main types of data that can be tracked:

1. Follower Highlights: Displays the number of total, organic and acquired followers in the last 30
days. It also indicates the percentage change from the previous 30 days for organic and
acquired followers.
2. Follower Gains: Displays how your number of followers has changed over time. You can view
different date ranges and control the time period this data covers by selecting the timeframe
dropdown next to ’Follower gains’ in the upper left corner of the page.
3. Follower Demographics: Includes a breakdown of who’s following your company using seven
types of demographic data: Country, Region, Job Function, Seniority, Industry, Company Size
and Employment Status. You can filter by each type of data by selecting the drop down next to
‘Follower Demographics’.
4. Companies To Track: Lets you see how your followers compare to other similar companies.
You can view the following metrics for the companies list: Total followers, Follower growth,
Number of updates and Social engagement.

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Campaign Manager provides performance metrics to help you measure the effectiveness of your
ad campaigns. These metrics can be seen in Campaign Manager when viewing your campaign.
They can also be downloaded as performance reports.

Some metrics will not be shown if you are not running that particular ad format, or do not have
that particular feature enabled. For example, if you're running Sponsored Content Ads, you will be
able to see social action data. If you are running Sponsored InMail ads, you will be able to see
Sends, Opens and other Sponsored InMail metrics. If you have LinkedIn Conversion Tracking set
up, then you will see conversion metrics.

To download a performance report, select one of the options from the ‘Export’ button in the top
right of the page. You can filter performance by date ranges or choose a custom date. This report
provides:
Campaign performance: Daily metrics for all campaigns in the account.
Ad performance: Daily metrics for each Creative across all campaigns in the account.
Click intelligence: A summary of who's clicked on your campaigns. Data in this summary is based
on your targeting filters.

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Now it’s time for Instagram!

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In this section, we’ll examine all of the different ad formats available on Instagram and the
corresponding campaign objective options for each format. We’ll then dive into ad buying and
how that process differs on desktop vs. in Instagram’s mobile app. We’ll then provide some best
practices for creating ads that will convert into real business value. Lastly, we’ll cover off how to
leverage Ads Manager and Instagram Insights to analyze your campaign performance.

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 Photo Ads on Instagram tell your brand’s story through a clean and simple creative canvas
in square or landscape format. With this ad format, there are a variety of CTAs available to drive
interaction and engagement from your audience, including: Book Now, Contact Us, Download,
Learn More, Shop Now, Sign Up, Watch More and Apply Now.

Photo Ads that contain images with little to no image text tend to cost less and reach more people
than ads with image text. If you need to include text in your image, try using fewer words and/or
reducing the font size of your text. Keep in mind that if your text is too small, it may be difficult to
read. Make sure most of the text you use is in the body text instead of directly on the ad's image.
The recommended image size is 1,200 x 628 pixels and image ratio 1.91:1.

Use the link in the resources section to check if your image will be approved by Facebook.

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Video Ads on Instagram are visually immersive ads with sight, sound and motion that can be up to
60 seconds long in landscape or square format. There are a few more CTA options available on
Video Ads, such as: Shop Now, Learn More, Get Showtimes, Sign Up, Book Now, Download, Watch
More, Send Message and Listen Now.

When creating or selecting a video to use, the aspect ratio should be 1:1, video compression at H.
264, the caption can only contain text (i.e. no emojis) and should be within 125 characters. The
thumbnail image you select should also match the aspect ratio of your video, and finally, as with
Image Ads, your image should include a minimal amount of text otherwise this will affect the
reach of your ad.

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Carousel Ads on Instagram allow users swipe to view additional photos or videos in a single
advert. With Carousels, the CTAs available are: Apply Now, Book Now, Contact Us, Download,
Learn More, Send Message, Get Showtimes, Request Time, See Menu, Shop Now, Sign Up, Watch
More, View Instagram Profile and Listen Now.

For Carousel ads, there are some specifications you need to be aware of in order to deliver a
successful ad. For starters, images/video in Carousels are referred to as ‘Cards’ and the minimum
cards allowed for a Carousel Ad is two, with a maximum of ten. Images should be 1,080 x 1,080
pixels and your caption can only contain text (no emojis) and should be less than 125 characters.

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Story Ads on Instagram are immersive, full screen vertical format adverts that appear after a user
has viewed an Instagram story. Users will only see Story Ads between stories, when they are in
the immersive viewer, with these ads disappearing after 24 hours. Users will not see the ad
preview in the tray before clicking into the immersive view.

CTAs available for Story Ads include: Apply Now, Book Now, Buy Now, Buy Tickets, Contact Us,
Download, Learn More, Shop Now, Sign Up, Watch More, Install App, Install Now and Use App.

Story Ads come in two formats, single image or single video, and have some pretty specific
requirements. Videos must be in a vertical format (9:16) and the recommended video resolution is
1080 x 1920. If your Story Ad is a video, the maximum file size is 4GB, but for image based Story
Ads, the maximum file size is 30MB. The maximum length for videos is 15 seconds and images can
be displayed for a maximum of 3 seconds each.

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Now that we know all the different Ad Formats available, let’s explore the campaign objectives
that Instagram offers and how they correspond to each ad format.

• The objectives available for Photos Ads are Brand Awareness and Engagement. For Video Ads
they are the same, but you also have the option of a Video Views objective as well.
• For Carousel Ads, your objective options are: App Installs, Brand Awareness and Conversions.
• And for Story Ads, the available objectives are: Reach, Video Views, Traffic and App Installs.

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When it comes to creating and buying ads for Instagram, Ads Manager is the easiest place to go
(see the direct link in the resources section). Instagram Ads can be created and bought just like
with Facebook Ads. Start by choosing a marketing objective (noting that not all objectives align
with Instagram ads), then name your ad campaign. After that, define your audience, placements,
budget and schedule. And finally, create your ad (or use an existing post).

Given Ads Manager is so comprehensive, it’s easy to get lost and sometimes hard to find where
exactly you need to go in order to make sure your ads only run on Instagram. To do this, when in
the Ad Set level, select ‘Placements’ from the menu on the left and then navigate to the Instagram
drop down menu in the center of the page. If you do only want your ad to run on Instagram, make
sure you de-select the other platform placement options (e.g. Facebook, Audience Network,
Messenger).

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If you’re on the go and don’t have time to log into Ads Manager, an alternative option is to
promote your posts within the Instagram app itself. Before you can do this, however, you need to
first convert to a Business Profile on Instagram and become an Admin of the Facebook Page
connected to your Instagram account.

When that’s done, it’s time to promote:

1. Start by selecting the post you want to promote by clicking on the blue ‘Promote’ button.
2. Next, choose your ad objective. There are only two to select from with this type of Instagram
ad buying: ‘Visit your website’ or ‘Call or visit your business’.
3. Next select your CTA. Depending on the objective you selected, different options will be
available. Make sure to choose one that aligns with the post you’re promoting.
4. After that, decide the audience you want to target. You can either let Instagram automatically
select your audience based on the users they think will be interested in your business, or else
you can create your own audience.
5. Next you need to choose a budget. Unlike in Ads Manager, budget options here are limited.
6. Then select the duration of the ad by choosing the number of days you want it to run.
7. Finally, review everything you’ve selected, preview your promotion and when you’re happy,
promote it!

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So now that we know all the ad formats, how to build a campaign and purchase ads, let’s discuss
some of the best practices for creating impactful Instagram ads that convert.

1. Firstly, your ad should always have a clear CTA. Instagram is a platform where content is
consumed very quickly, so you need to clearly express what you want your audience to take
away, or take action on, after seeing your ad.
2. You should also be using high-quality imagery that clearly showcases your products to
maximize brand recognition.
3. Make sure the caption copy on your post is quick and actionable – as mentioned, your
audience should be able to quickly discern what you’d like them to do after seeing your ad.
4. Finally, your messaging should also be on-brand and your post content should leverage your
company’s color palette to enhance brand recognition and memorability.

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Just like with Facebook reporting, Instagram ad campaigns can be analyzed through Facebook Ads
Manager. Simply select your campaign, ad set and ad and then filter the results to show only
Instagram-related data. You can get quite granular with your reporting here and customize the
data you want to see and export by selecting the ‘Performance’ and ‘Breakdown’ drop down
menus.

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Instagram Insights is a tool available with Instagram for Business used for content and follower
analysis so that you can tailor your posts to be more relevant for your audience. It gives you
insights like gender, age range, location, post and story engagement.

To access Instagram Insights, you must have an Instagram Business account.

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We’re nearly finished! Last on the list is Snapchat.

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In this final section, we’ll discuss Snapchat’s 3V advertising and the associated ad products the
platform offers. Then we’ll walk through the functionality of Snapchat’s native, self-service Ad
Manager and its 3-level campaign structure.

Next, we’ll dive into the various types of SnapAds and their corresponding objectives. Then we’ll
show you how to create a Geofilter and explain the process behind sponsoring Lenses. We’ll look
at Snapchat’s targeting options and discuss the simplicity behind setting up an ad campaign
through Ad Manager. Finally, we’ll show you Snapchat Analytics and discuss what metrics are
trackable on the platform.

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3V (Vertical, Video, Views) advertisements are a Snapchat native format of advertising where all
ads are 100% viewable and shareable. It’s an end-to-end experience for the user.

• Vertical: Refers to the orientation of the ad; because mobile screens are typically held
vertically, Snapchat ads are vertical to fit the screen.
• Video: The best channel for branding campaigns and videos are what Snapchat viewers expect
to see.
• Views: Means that Snapchat video ads are viewed by choice.

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There are three main advertising products on Snapchat:

1. SnapAds: A ten-second Snap displayed between friends’ stories or live stories.

2. Geofilters: Location based overlays that users can apply to their Snaps. Brands can purchase
Geofilters for their event, business or a specific location and can include brand logos and
trademarks.
3. Sponsored Lenses: A combination of 3D animations, facial recognition software, augmented
reality and a selfie to create user-excitement.

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Snapchat’s Ad Manager provides you with the tools to build audiences, manage and optimize
campaigns, manage your creatives and monitor the performance of your ads.

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Just like with Facebook, Snapchat campaigns have a three-level structure:

1. Campaign Level: This is where your campaign objectives are chosen, of which there are four:
Drive traffic to my website, Drive installs of my app, Grow awareness and Drive video views.
2. Ad Set Level: The first thing you do at the Ad Set level is define your goals, of which there are
four: Swipe Ups, Installs, Impressions and Views. After that, you need to choose your target
audience, schedule and budget.
3. Ads: Finally, you choose the SnapAd creative/format you want to run.

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There are three types of SnapAds which can be created within Snapchat Ad Manager: Web View,
App Install and Long-form Video.

Let’s start by looking at Web View SnapAds. These are 10 second teaser Snaps that allows users to
swipe upward to launch a pre-selected mobile site within a seamless, full-screen experience.
Snapchat get quite specific with all ad specification requirements, so be sure to review the link in
the references to get a full picture of exactly what is required to run a web-view SnapAd.

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App Install SnapAds are ten second teaser Snaps that drive installs for the user’s app directly to
App Store or Google Play with a swipe and a tap. Again, be sure to check out the link in the
references for all the details required to run an App Install SnapAd.

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And finally, long form video SnapAds are ten second video Snaps that allow users to swipe upward
to stream branded content of up to ten minutes of vertical or horizontal video. A link to view the
ad specifications for long form video SnapAds is in the references section.

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Geofilters are a great, fun way to drive engagement with your target audience, grow brand
awareness and drive affinity. If you have an in-house design team or agency you work with,
Geofilters can be created on their own, or else you can design one yourself using a template from
geofilters.snapchat.com.

To create your own Geofilter, follow these four steps:

1. Create your Geofilter design on your preferred image editing software or design it online on
Snapchat’s Geofilter website.
2. Select start and end dates and times for when you would like Snapchatters to be able to use
your Filter.
3. Draw your Geofence. Keep in mind that it should cover the relevant area of your business or
event and be between 20,000 and 50,000 square feet.
4. Purchase your Geofilter with your line of credit or credit card and submit!

When the time comes to report on the success of your Snapchat Geofilters, it’s important to be
able to differentiate between the following two metrics:
• Uses: The number of times your Geofilter was applied to a Snap.
• Views: The number of times a user watched a Snap with your Geofilter in a Story, or on a Snap
sent to them. For more information on Geofilter and Geofence specifications, view the link in
the references section.

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Sponsored lenses are the most premium ad-buy on Snapchat. Taco Bell was the first to put this on
the map with a successful launch during Cinco De Mayo with over 224 million views. Sponsored
Lenses are highly utilized during major events, and Snapchat has created an ad product that gets
people thrilled to share advertisements with their friends. This is a major benefit for advertisers
as many people view ads as a hindrance to their own digital experience.

Given the complexities of face tracking, animation and 3D modelling, developing sponsored face
lenses requires significantly more commitment and engagement with the Snapchat team than
developing Geofilters. Lenses require significant planning and commitment and really are only
suitable for large companies with large budgets and broad appeal. They can cost anywhere
between $400k and $800k and prices change depending on the day of the week. As these lenses
are high in price, they are obtained through Snapchat’s relationship with the brand and created
either in-house or with a Snapchat partner.

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When it comes to targeting on Snapchat, there are five options:

1. Predefined Audiences: This option allows you choose from over 300 audiences based on what
Snapchatters care about, what they buy, what they watch and where they go.
2. Demographics: Here you can get specific with age, location, device type and advanced
demographics like household income and parental status.
3. Audience Match: This option lets you combine your data with Snapchat’s to build custom
audiences. All you have to do is drag and drop a customer list to get started.
4. Lookalike Expansions: Here you can expand your reach and fine tune performance by building
lookalike audiences similar to your best customers.
5. Geofilters: And finally, Geofilters let you inspire customers in your neighborhood or pre-
defined Geofence.

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Snapchat Ad Manager is an incredibly easy interface to navigate, so once your story has been
locked down, creatives have been set and advertising strategy has been defined, really you can
have a Snapchat ad campaign running within minutes. Check out this video for a step-by-step
guide on how to use the tool.

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Snapchat analytics is ever evolving, and just like Ad Manager, the analytics feature is easy to
navigate. As you can see here, data provided is the average spend, number of impressions, eCPM
(effective Clicks-Per-Thousand Impressions), Swipes and Cost per Swipe. Metrics and columns can
also be customized according to your reporting needs.

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