Many times, we’ve been quoted saying that social media is a pay-to-play game. No matter how many times we say it, it never fails to be true! When you’re looking into ways to advertise your business online, it’s reasonable to wonder about the most cost-effective options that’ll still get you the reach and engagement you’re after. We’ve put together a list of the cost of ads across several popular social media platforms!
On Twitter, there are essentially three types of advertisements for business campaigns: promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends. Before we talk money, let’s break down what each of these are.
Promoted tweets are specific tweets which are boosted to be shown to a larger audience. Similarly, promoted accounts are accounts whose tweets are consistently promoted. Finally, promoted trends appear on the Trending page of the app, and they are essentially topics that many people are going to be tweeting about.
The first two, promoted tweets and accounts, typically cost around $0.50 to $4.00 per engagement. That includes likes, follows, retweets, and replies. Promoted trends, on the other hand, can cost about $200,000 a day. That’s…crazy. But if you have the budget for it, no one is stopping you!
However, if you’re new to Twitter marketing, consider Twitter Promote Mode. For a flat rate of $99/month (plus tax), your first 10 tweets each day will be promoted to your specified audience. Twitter has estimated that this reaches an average of 30,000 new users per day and gains accounts roughly 30 extra followers each month.
Facebook is one of the most frequently discussed platforms for social media advertising. When you ask most people how much it costs, though, the most frequent answer is, “it depends.” While it’s true that cost does depend on the size of your business, your budget for ads, and your audience, we can be a little more specific than “it depends.”
In most cases, the average CPC for most businesses ranges between $0.50 and $2.00 per click; the average, according to WebFX, is about $0.97. However, based on the way you budget your ad spend, you could have a lower or higher CPC.
There are essentially two ways to budget your Facebook ads. The first is to create a daily budget; this is how much you’ll devote each day to having your brand advertised on Facebook’s feed. The second is to set a lifetime budget; this allows Facebook to generate a daily budget for you based on how much you’re willing to spend throughout the entire ad campaign. In essence, the cost of your Facebook ads is whatever you’re willing to spend.
Snapchat
Snapchat, believe it or not, is sort of on the higher end when it comes to placing ads. According to many sources, the average cost to run a Snapchat ad is $3000/month. They require a minimum ad spend of $5/day, not to mention the agency fees (20% of the total ad spend with a $1000/month minimum) and the internal costs of creating the ad in the first place.
Snapchat also offers a type of advertising style called goal-based bidding, which optimizes the money you’re spending towards a certain action you expect your audience to take. You can read more about that on Snapchat’s website.
Since Instagram is part of Facebook, it’s no surprise that the ad-publishing process is fairly similar. However, in 2016, a study found that the average CPC on Instagram was roughly double that of Facebook. This may seem like you’re spending a whole lot more money, but Instagram’s ad engagement rate is higher than Facebook’s; you’re likely to reach a greater audience on Instagram.
On average, the CPC on Instagram ads is $0.70. Like Facebook, you can choose to set a daily budget or a lifetime budget to control your ad spend. Therefore, also like Facebook, you’ll get out what you put in.
Overall, when creating your social media strategy, feel free to pick and choose the social media platforms you want to advertise on. If they’re from this list, great! If not, also great! Be sure to let us know where you’re finding the most success advertising.
Need help navigating the crazy world of social media? Have no fear – Blackwood Creative is here. We’re the experts in content marketing and social media advertising; we’d love to help your brand or business. Let’s create something beautiful together.
