11 Examples of Facebook Ads That Actually Work (And Why)

Facebook Web Page ImageI love seeing ‘best of’ examples of anything. I especially love the breakdowns of the nuts and bolts that short cut the time it takes to make all the same mistakes that led to the results being showcased. It makes it possible to implement at a more advanced stage.

Thanks to HubSpot for

11 Examples of Facebook Ads That Actually Work (And Why)

4 Types Of Instagram Hashtags And How To Make Them Work For Your Brand

 at Media Post offers some simple best practices for optimizing media value. Instagram hashtags are especially useful for visual branding, marking a milestone, announcing an event or celebrating a breakthrough.

Follow these tips and your Instagram hashtags will work even harder for you.

10 Reasons Why You Should Use Hashtags and Where

Content Marketers Guide To Sponsored Social Media Posts

by Jason Konopinski 3 days agoFILED UNDER: DESIGN

You’ve worked hard to create an amazing campaign for your brand, combining top-notch content and engaging visuals. Now all you have to do is get that content in front of as many eyes as possible.

Social media offers brands a distribution channel for the promotion and amplification of their content, but it’s also becoming an increasingly noisy place. To stand out above the clamor of the Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter crowds and train the right eyes onto your content, you need to spend a little scratch to boost the reach of that content. Why? Because it’s just not going to be seen otherwise.

You’re probably thinking, “but social media is supposed to be open and free!” Sorry, that’s no longer the case. (We’ll tell you why below.)

And hand in hand with paid placement comes creating the right images to help boost performance further. Here’s what you need to know about getting your content promoted on each of the leading social networks.

Facebook

As a publicly traded company, Facebook must now demonstrate profitability to shareholders. The result? The well-documented decline of brand pages’ organic reach. For content marketers on both the agency and brand side, this means one thing: Facebook is quickly becoming a pay-to-play network.

Facebook’s self-serve advertising platform makes it easy to hyper-target key audiences, but there are some tips for crafting a relevant and effective ad — one that gets clicked, and more importantly, converts the person on the other side of the click into a fan, lead, or customer.

Relevance, a great call-to-action and a crystal clear value proposition work together to pull the user into your content, but it all comes down to strong visuals and ideal image size.

Facebook Desktop App Ad

On Facebook, the best image size to upload is 1200 x 627px. If you’re placing an ad front and center into the newsfeed, you’re looking at a minimum of 600 x 600 pixels. Jon Loomer wrote an excellent post outlining the optimal image sizes for various Facebook ad products and media type. Keep it handy as you’re optimizing images for the most effective ads possible.

Source: JonLoomer.com


 

There’s good reason that big, bold visuals capture our attention as we’re doing a quick scroll through a Facebook timeline — they stand out against a wall of text. Newsfeed ads with clear calls-to-action (Install this App, Play this Game!) can be irresistible to eyes bored with text update after text update.

A few key considerations:

  • You’re limited to ninety characters to make your pitch, so keep it simple. Clarity trumps cleverness every time. Reserve about 25 characters for the headline — that’s about five words.
  • Facebook’s guidelines limit the amount of text in images to 20%. Don’t fret. They’ve made it easy to check with this super handy grid tool.
  • Choose the right type of ad for the right result. Promoted posts or Page Post ads are most often used to promote brand Facebook pages, but that doesn’t mean they’re off limits to other types of content. If you’re driving signups for a webinar series or announcing the availability of a new white paper, for instance, a promoted post is the most basic and least expensive option for showcasing visual content.

Twitter

If you think Facebook is getting noisy, get a load of Twitter. According to Twitter’s recent IPO documentation, there are over 500 million tweets sent each day. That’s a lot of noise to rise above and get your content the attention it deserves.

Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards were made available to all advertisers on the micro-blogging platform late last year. They’re like embedded landing pages in the body of a tweet. For your community following your tweets via twitter.com, they’re simple, one-click opt-ins for newsletters, claiming coupons and offers, or registering for your latest webinar.

Here’s what you need to know about Twitter Cards (there are seven types that can be attached to tweets for a beautiful content consumption experience on web or mobile):

  • The minimum required width for your uploaded image is 600px and at least 4:1 aspect ratio.
  • Supported file types are: jpg, jpeg, png and gif.
  • The card title should describe to content of the offer, and it’s a hard stop at 50 characters.
  • Call to action label – Choose short calls to actions that make the benefit obvious. You have 20 characters to work with here, make ‘em count.
  • To make Twitter cards display properly, you have to include a bit of HTML in your site header, butthat’s easy to do.

EastIndiaTeaCompany Twitter Card

East India Tea Company used Twitter Cards to promote their blog posts. It’s a great use for online brand development. In this application, the enhanced layout looks very much like a rich snippet you’d find in search engine results and provide context to the content, encouraging more clickthroughs and deeper engagement onsite.

The Barista Bar Twitter Card

LinkedIn

Let’s not forget LinkedIn. It’s all business, all the time on LinkedIn, as it should be. If your brand is targeting other business professionals, LinkedIn advertising offers a number of products to boost conversions and drive traffic. Sponsored posts pull images from the source links, but you have to define images for sidebar ads.

linkedin-ads

LinkedIn supports image uploads for ads (PNG, JPEG, or GIF) with a maximum size of 2MB. Once it’s uploaded, your image will be resized to fix a 50px square. Ads with images perform up to 20% better, according to LinkedIn.

What you need to know:

  • Ad headlines are limited to 25 characters.
  • Body descriptions are limited to 75 characters.
  • Test, test, and test some more. The LinkedIn advertising platform will let you launch up to 15 different versions of the same ad to see which one proves most effective. This can help you test different combinations of headline, description, image and landing page to hit paydirt.

LinkedIn Engine

Remember that the social networks are distribution channels and, increasingly, display ad networks, so you have to carve out a little budget to train more qualified eyeballs on your content to meet those important business outcomes.

Want to learn about creating visual content that drives engagement? Download our white paper, Visuals That Stick, with actionable advice on impactful design from the Visually creative team.


 
 

Jason Konopinski has been living the life of a fulltime freelancer since 2007, specializing in data-driven content development and lead-nurturing frameworks. He has worked with boutique PR, marketing, and advertising agencies to develop strategy, create cross-platform and cross-medium content, and help clients tell better stories. You can connect with him on Twitter at @jasonkonopinski.

Pinterest For Marketing

Great bullet points at the end of Ira Blacker’s article

on using Pinterest for part of your business marketing strategy. When you think about it, every result has a corresponding image that lives in the beholder’s eye.

The first thing you need is a worthy image and one that may interest others who will like it enough in order to “re pin” it on their Pinterest page. Re pins are the same as when someone re tweets your post on Twitter or re posts your blog on LinkedIn. It provides your original post with more “Google juice.” Google especially likes to see the original post, image or blog gain momentum from reposting or commentary from others as this enhances your “Google Authorship.” There are two ways to find quality images, either by finding some on the web or creating your own via your photography or Photoshop skills.

Once you have found an appropriate image, it can be uploaded to Pinterest on its own or as part of your blog as I regularly do. Browser plug-ins such as “Add-This” and others support a one click add of your blog image to Pinterest or you can simply upload one via the Pinterest web.  Once uploaded there are several things you then need do in order to “market” your image.

  • Create a “board” and name it for your important keyword such as “my books.” (You can create several boards)
  • “Curate” some other great pins from others in order to provide your boards with great content.
  • Start uploading your own unique pins
  • Add a link to your web or blog.
  • Add tags via “hash tags” such as #books
  • Place a description as to the content of your blog/web page/about…
  • Use keywords related to your brand in the description
  • Use other social media sites to promote your pins on Pinterest. Tweet your pin, etc.
  • Embed the Pinterest button on your web or blog so that “pinnable content” makes it easy and inviting for others.
  • Follow other’s boards in order to encourage them to follow yours and say thank you when your images are “re-pinned” by others.
  • Take advantage of the new “Business Page” from Pinterest which will give you more tools and help with your overall branding.
  • Create attractive coupons for offers you have as a pin.
  • You now can add “animated gif” images as pins. It is sort of like a mini trailer or video.

– See more at: http://www.pbdink.com/blog/2014/04/10/marketing-pinterest/#sthash.fJqEjlVF.dpuf

How to Get Started With Instagram Marketing

InstagramTo learn how to get started with Instagram marketing, Michael Stelzner interviews Sue B. Zimmerman for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.

About the Author, Michael Stelzner

Michael Stelzner is the founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner, and author of the books Launch and Writing White Papers. He’s also the host of the Social Media Marketing podcast. Other posts by »

How Smart Phones Have Changed The Way We Interact With Each Other

The invention of smartphones has given us a lot of things and has made communication easier than ever. However, it’s also changed the entire dynamic of how we interact in person and how we approach our day-to-day lives. This short film from CharstarleneTV shows just how obsessed we’ve become over capturing each moment in our lives.

Well, maybe not all of us are this obsessed. At least we can hope not.