Considering that there are currently 1.55 billion active users on Facebook, 400+ million on Instagram and 300+ million on Twitter, it’s time to recognize that these social networks have serious potential to generate leads for most any business.

Let’s start with the goliath of the social media world. Facebook now offers so many advertising formats that marketers are having trouble keeping up! The important thing is not to use all of Facebook’s ad formats, but rather the ones that are better suited to your objectives. For the purposes of this exercise, we will focus on the ones that are best suited to convert leads.

Facebook Advertising

The Carousel Ad is a popular Facebook ad type geared at driving website traffic to your landing page. The big advantage it offers over other formats is the multi-image display that you can utilize to tell a story, show multiple products or even highlight individual features of your product. Video content will soon represent 80% of the world’s web content, so it’s no surprise that Facebook’s video ads are also extremely effective. The most important thing to remember with video ads is to leave the viewer wanting more and to utilize Facebook’s call-to-action buttons. This will help drive traffic to your site or drive up phone calls, depending on what you want.

Instagram Advertising

Video ads are equally, if not more, effective on Instagram. It’s easy to see why it is quickly becoming popular among SMBs who want to advertise online. Users tend to engage more on Instagram than any other social network, 30% check it on a daily basis and it has proven to have a strong influence on purchase decisions. So how do you drive leads from it? Instagram offers website click ads just like Facebook, which you can point to your landing page. In fact, you can use the exact same ad on both Facebook and Instagram, however a best practice would be to run them separately and use an individual landing pages for each. Keep in mind that Instagram users are definitely on their mobile phone and your landing page should be optimized for mobile viewing.

Twitter Advertising

Displaying ads on Twitter can be quite lucrative if well-targeted and well-worded. Twitter offers several ad formats as well, but the most interesting is definitely the Leads on Twitter format. Just like other social networks, a call-to-action and a compelling image are key to the success of your ad campaign. Precise targeting is another way to drive up your leads, particularly through the use of ‘keyword targeting.’ Similar to search engine advertisements, Twitter allows you to target relevant keywords that Twitter users are typing in their Tweets and interacting with.

Hopefully this article has provided you with some insight on how to utilize social media advertising to generate leads for your business. If you would like to learn more about running display advertising on social networks, feel free to visit our Social Media Display Advertising page.