Social Media Ads eat cash for breakfast

Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter and many other social media sites are all offering some form of advertising packages for businesses and individuals. The question is: “Is it worth it or a waste of money?”

Mixed reviews

Many of my viewers are telling me that they find these types of ads extremely helpful, while others, like myself, are telling otherwise. The real challenge resides in the fact that you can’t genuinely separate followers resulting from the ad from the followers you would get anyway or otherwise. Another challenge resides in the difficulty to distinguish bogus followers from true followers. The anonymity of the results is also a big negative. There is no engagement breakdown, the same person could have clicked on the tweet five times.

After having very carefully targeted your audience and defined your goal, the only way to know if any of these social media ads work for you and are worthy of spending is to try it out and experiment. Before deciding that it may be worth investing some of your hard earned money in any social media ads program, just make sure that you know who you are trying to reach, why you are doing it, how to do it and that you have sufficient time to follow up on your investment. 

You want to give it a try!

Whatever you decide to do, just remember:

You will need a big budget to see any real impact. If you are a start-up or small and medium sized enterprise with a small or non-existent budget, your money will be definitely better spent elsewhere: Social Media Ads eat cash for breakfast; even with careful targeting, your money will drain long before seeing any positive return on your investment. Just remember that tweets without images have a far smaller engagement rate. A lot of your clicks will come from people clicking the image to see where it is coming from or what it says. As far as I am concerned, for purely traffic purposes, Social Media Advertising is a waste of time, money and energy.

Cheers and Ride On!

JMD

jmdlive@live.ca

Michel Ouellette JMD [jmdlive.com] is a Public Affairs & Communications Strategist, a writer, a columnist, a social activist and a  miracle worker for entrepreneurs, executives and social innovators.