If you're looking to increase your brand's visibility on social media, sponsored posts could be the answer. In this article we will provide you with everything you need to know about sponsored posts and how they can become a powerful tool to boost your marketing strategy on the most popular digital platforms. Read on and discover the power of social media advertising!
Social media advertising is a digital marketing strategy that involves the promotion of products, services, or brands through the various platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, and YouTube. Each medium offers unique characteristics and advertising formats that suit different marketing objectives. In the social media universe, there are a variety of ways to advertise; however, one of the most prominent and effective ways to reach target audiences is sponsored posts.
Sponsored posts are paid publications that appear in the news feed of users on social networks. These posts are often identified as “sponsored” or “advertising”. Sponsored posts can include images, videos, or promotional text and are usually intended to generate interaction and brand awareness.
Among the greatest benefits of sponsored posts is the ability to segment specific audiences, as each social network provides tools that allow companies to choose characteristics, such as interests, demographics, geographic location, among others. This allows key messages to reach the right people who are interested in purchasing your products or services.
The process for making a sponsored post is very similar to creating content for social networks or articles for websites.
The first step will always be to select the social media influencer or blogger (in case you are working on an SEO strategy with articles on the web) with whom you will develop the content you want to promote. To do this you will have to define the objective of the publication as well as the profile of the audience you want to reach. Then you must define the budget you are willing to invest and send a proposal to the influencer or blogger.
This creator must start generating content to be shared on social networks or your website. According to what is agreed in the collaboration agreement, the format may vary between images, carousels, texts, articles, videos, etc.
During the execution of the promotion, you must track metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions to evaluate the performance of your sponsored post. Based on this collected data, you will be able to adjust your strategy and improve your results.
You might be interested in: Using data to identify influencers
Both campaigns and sponsored posts are advertising strategies used on social networks to promote products, services, or key messages. Although both approaches aim to reach a specific audience and generate interaction, there are some differences between them:
In both cases it is possible to use demographic and interest-based segmentation to reach a target audience; however, it is important to highlight that sponsored posts, especially when done in collaboration with influencers, are up to 22 times more attractive. This has led more than 74% of marketers to start implementing more sponsored post strategies over campaigns.
Read also: Use influencer-generated content to connect with your target audience.
To get the most out of a sponsored post, the best time to run it is when you have a promotion or product/service launch during a specific period of time. In the case of offers, you can highlight the details and drive traffic to a landing page to maximize conversion.
If your company is launching a new product and you want to generate more visibility and awareness in a short period of time, a sponsored post may be the most appropriate way to achieve this. With the sponsored post you will be able to present the product’s features and benefits and direct users to get more information or make a direct purchase. For the case of companies that are organizing events, sponsored content can help to promote it effectively.
Finally, if you’re managing your network advertising on a limited budget, sponsored content is often a more affordable option. Instead of investing in a complete campaign, you can select the key publications you want to promote and thus optimize the investment.
The characteristics of sponsored posts may vary according to the platform on which they are published, although in most cases they share these general rules:
With 2.96 billion people connected, Facebook leads the ranking of platforms with the most active users, making this social network a pillar within the digital marketing strategies of companies. Sponsored posts, then, are an effective tool to reach key audiences, increase the reach or visits per month of a page, or promote a product or service on Facebook.
To create a sponsored post on Facebook, you must use the “Ads Manager” tool and follow the steps to create an advertising campaign. To do this effectively, it is essential to take into account the goals of the campaign and the target audience .
Indeed, according to a study conducted by Shareablee, sponsored posts, especially when done in collaboration with influencers, have a greater reach than traditional advertisements. To this end, 833 sponsored brand content ads from 10 different pages and 265 traditional ads from 47 company pages were analyzed. The result was evident and showed clearly that average Facebook users consider sponsored posts much more valuable to share.
This does not mean that advertisers should leave aside standard advertising; on the contrary, combining both advertising strategies will be much more effective than using them independently.
To create sponsored posts on Facebook you can use any of the following options:
We recommend you read: What content works best on Facebook?
To create a sponsored post on Facebook is very simple and you have several options. One easy way is by using the “Boost post” tool that appears at the bottom right of each post on your Facebook page. When you click on this option, you will be asked to select the audience you want to reach and the budget you want to invest.
The other way is through Facebook Ads Manager. To do this, you must follow the steps below:
Statistics suggest that Instagram is one of the most important platforms for marketers and businesses in the coming years, with a growing user base and ad revenue.
According to HubSpot, 22% of marketers say Instagram has the highest growth potential in 2023 of any platform, as Instagram is expected to reach 1.44 billion users by 2025.
In Spain, Instagram has 21.9 million users, meaning that almost 50% of the country’s total population is on this social network; people use it for an average of 1 hour and 28 minutes a day.
Creating sponsored posts for this wide audience is one of the most appropriate ways to generate higher conversions for brands. Advertisers, just like on Facebook, have a variety of formats to create promoted posts, among them:
The most prominent types of Instagram ads are very similar to those offered by Facebook:
The various types of promoted posts can go onto Instagram’s main feed as stories or IGTV. Also, in 2022, the platform announced that Instagram Reels could be used to boost branding strategies, offering the possibility of turning a reel into an ad to reach new audiences and generate more engagement. To be able to perform this action, the video must be less than 60 seconds long and have a 9:16 measurement, which means it is filmed vertically, and has a full-screen format.
If you want to include Instagram reels in your branding strategy, we recommend reading Kolsquare Reels Instagram influencer marketing blog: 6 tips to capture attention.
Just like the other platforms, Twitter also offers the possibility to manage sponsored posts; for this, you will need to have a Twitter Ads account.
To create a Twitter Ads account, you must first log in to twitter.com with your existing account or create a new account if you don’t have one yet. Then, go to ads.twitter.com. Once there, you can set up your ad account by providing the necessary information, such as your company name, contact details, and billing preferences. In addition, you can link your ad account to a credit card or bank account to pay for your ad campaigns. Read also: How to use Twitter for influencer marketing.
Once you have set up your ad account, you can start creating and promoting your Tweets from that account. You can select existing Tweets that you have posted on your main Twitter account and promote them to reach more people or create new Tweets specifically for your ad campaigns.
On LinkedIn, sponsored links function as a collection of ads and can be created in these different formats:
Please note that in order to promote a publication, you must have the permissions of an advertising account associated with that page. For more information you can refer to the LinkedIn help center articles. Additionally, you will need to have Super Admin, Content Manager, or Sponsored Content Advertiser access on the related page.
To set up your sponsored post on LinkedIn you have two options: Manage it through the platform’s campaign manager or promote the post directly.
Once you have completed the steps, the sponsored content will be displayed in the LinkedIn feed of the target audience.
In addition to social media, it is also possible to create sponsored posts on themed blogs. Sponsored blog posts are a form of collaboration between a brand and a blogger, in which the brand pays the blogger to create and publish promotional articles on its website. These sponsored posts aim to reach the blogger’s audience and promote the brand’s products or services in a more subtle and contextual way.
Sponsored blog posts offer several benefits for companies, like increasing your company’s online visibility and attracting new customers. In most cases, the guidelines are integrated naturally within the content; the blogger creates an article or post that relates to his or her usual subject matter and at a certain point promotes the brand’s products or services in an authentic way.
But in addition to connecting with new audiences, another very common objective for using sponsored articles in blogs is to improve a company’s web positioning in search engines, such as Google. In many cases, managing this paid content serves to improve SEO strategy by creating a sponsored link to your site on a reputable and authoritative blog. This outbound link strategy in SEO is known as link building and usually represents brands with better positioning of their domain, increased credibility, brand reputation, and increased business opportunities.
To further boost the impact of your blogs, you can use sponsored posts on social networks. Sharing the article developed by the blogger and replicating it on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn will generate greater visibility and reach, which can represent more leads and conversions for your company. In addition, if you can create sponsored posts with influencers, you can take advantage of the databases that are part of their community and thus generate more traffic to your website.
To find and hire content creators for social networks or blogs you have several options :
You can use specialized influencer marketing platforms that connect brands with influencers and content creators. These platforms allow you to search and filter influencers according to your needs and budget. An example of this service is Kolsquare’s leading influencer marketing platform in Europe. This is a data-driven tool that allows brands to scale their Influencer Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with content creators. Request a free demo of our software now.
Social networks themselves can be extremely useful for finding and connecting with content creators relevant to your industry. Search for related hashtags, research popular accounts, and reach out to creators to explore opportunities for collaboration. Keep in mind that this option may take longer from the first communication to getting a response.
There are online groups and communities related to your industry. You can find groups on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Reddit where content creators gather to share ideas and opportunities for collaboration. Ask around and look for recommendations in these groups to find bloggers or social media content creators.
Searching directly on search engines like Google using keywords might yield some interesting results. In any case, remember that before closing and signing a collaboration contract you should analyze the metrics of that influencer or blogger to make sure you are connecting with the right audience.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors. Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.
.png)
