Anthony Tat | @TatAnthony

With all the instructional articles available, you may already know the steps for getting a Facebook or Twitter campaign up and running. However, there are many features, strategies and options that aren’t taught in your typical how-to’s. These are 5 social media advertising tips for Facebook and Twitter that will take your campaigns from ordinary to extraordinary and ultimately help you achieve desired results and obtain a greater ROI.

1. Quality Score

Your quality score is exactly as it sounds. It’s a score given to your ads that tell you its quality. In Facebook, this is called the Relevance Score, which essentially represents your ad’s relevance based on its level of engagement. The higher your ad’s engagement, the higher the relevance score. A higher relevance score results in greater impressions and lower cost per engagement.

Above is the relevancy score of an ad we ran. With 10 being the highest score achievable, 9 is pretty darn good. For a measly twelve dollars, this ad reached over six thousand people, and the cost per engagement was only three cents! If your score is slacking, you can take action to increase it by adjusting the content, copy, creative or targeting. Test each of these variables until your ad is more relevant.

Twitter’s Quality Adjusted Bid depends on three key factors: Resonance, Relevance, and Recency. Resonance depends on how often your ads are retweeted, favorited or replied to. Relevance represents how relevant your ad is to your target audience. Recency is the age of your ad. Ads get less impressions as they age, so keep them fresh. Every 1% increase in engagement results in 5% decrease in cost, so it can save you a lot of money to have an engaging ad.

1. Ad-Worthy Content

Quantity plays a large role in your organic content strategy. It’s best to post often to increase the chance of your content being seen organically by your followers. However, you should be extremely picky when it comes to your promoted content. Choose your boosted posts and promoted tweets carefully. Find your top-performing organic posts through Facebook insights and Twitter data exports and put money behind those. You should strive for specific targeting to achieve high engagement rates. Remember: post more, promote the best.

1. Targeting Keywords

Twitter ads allow you to include specific keywords used by your target market. Your ads will be placed in front of users who say or search these keywords. If you are a clothing brand, you should already be targeting relevant keywords such as clothes, fashion, outfits, dresses, etc. Unfortunately, all your competitors are also targeting these obvious keywords. An advanced advertiser should go one step further to target key phrases indicating a need for the company’s products. Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and imagine the types of tweets they would write. They might say, “I have nothing to wear tonight,” so you should target the phrase “nothing to wear.” Doing so will increase your ad’s engagement rate as these users have already indicated a need for your products and are therefore more likely to click your ad and visit your site.

1. In-Market Segments

In addition to targeting keywords and phrases, increase purchase intent by using in-market segments. You can reach consumers in a specific in-market segment by targeting purchase behaviors, i.e. the products they buy. These consumers are already shopping in relevant categories, and by putting your brand in front of them, you increase brand awareness and the likelihood of a future purchase. A children’s toy company can reach parents (in-market segment) by targeting people who shop for kids cereals, school supplies, or other children’s toys (purchase behavior).

1. Demographics

You can also increase purchase intent by targeting an audience of precise demographics. These aren’t your basic demographics such as age, gender and location. Facebook and Twitter provide the option to target users by education, household size, income and life events.

Using the children’s toy company again as an example, you could target household sizes of three or more, as those are more likely to consist of parents and children. You could also target life events such as new parents or parents-to-be. If the product is age-specific, target parents with children of those ages. If the product is particularly high-end, target high household incomes to ensure the users are qualified and can afford to make the purchase.

These 5 social media ad tips should hopefully take your ad campaigns to the next level. Follow them to pick the right content, boost engagement and escalate purchase intent, ultimately increasing conversions and ROI.

Find out more ways you can improve your social media strategies and advertising campaigns by visiting our blog.