8 Best Social Media Platforms for Paid Advertising in 2023

Social media platforms allow small businesses to go for paid advertising as it provides huge potential traffic, leads, and sales.

Therefore paid advertising also known as social media paid ads is increasingly rising in demand.

Because this is the first time in the history of generations that any business small or big can generate great results from Social Media.

No doubt, social media paid ads and the online advertising industry is booming today.

Where marketer spends thousands of dollars every single day to generate millions in revenue.

So this is an era where startups can explode instantly on social media.

And promote their products and services and reach their targeted audience to generate more leads and sales.

However, it depends on digital marketing strategies for the type of business you have i.e. the kinds of services you provide or the kind of products you manufacture and sell.

Top 8 Social Media Platforms for Paid Advertising

If you are a service provider you can easily generate leads through one or more social Media Paid Advertising platforms.

But more importantly, the quality of your leads matters most for your business.

On the other hand, if you are into a product-based business, you can directly go for your product sales conversion.

Here the conversion may vary depending on the type of product you sell and its demand versus the supply.

So for better conversion, you need to know who your market audiences are.

Moreover, for high-value products, it is important for you to generate leads first and secondly nurture those leads for conversion via emails or phone calls.

However, social media advertising works wonders for all low-ticket items depending on the demand.

So if you exactly know your target audience it can inevitably become profitable for you.

Mostly E-commerce businesses are more profitable by playing around with low-ticket items through social media advertising.

Thus all you need to know is which advertising platform is best for your business,

And understand what works best for you, and undoubtedly know who are your target audiences.

Usually, when it comes to lead generation there are various strategies in the field of online marketing, however, only social media advertising strategies prove more effective.

Let us take a look at some of the top social media paid advertising platforms for effective lead generation.

1. Social Media Advertising on Facebook

With over 2.2 billion users on Facebook, Facebook Advertising is undoubtedly the most widely used paid advertising channel on social media.

There are various other social media advertising platforms on Social Media.

But Facebook has boomed PPC advertising hugely over the past 5 years, allowing you to use text and image ads, video ads, and even more such as:

• With detailed audience targeting available, it’s never been easier to target the right people at the right time.
• The ability to narrow down a large section of the targeted audience is incredible in Facebook ads for generating the most leads and purchases.
• Using lead generation you can collect lead information directly into Facebook.
• Redirect your audience to your website only with a click-to-website campaign and aim for higher conversions and more.

Facebook also provides several ad formats to structure your ads such as single image and video ads, carousel ads, and collection ads.

All businesses want to know that they are using their ad dollars most efficiently.

So Facebook introduced the concept of CBO.

Using campaign budget optimization, now advertisers can set one central campaign budget to optimize across ad sets.

And distribute the budget to the top-performing ad sets in real time.

Campaign budget optimization is available for any campaign objective and is best suited for campaigns with multiple ad sets.

It also eliminates the need to manually shift budgets between ad sets.

2. Instagram Advertising

Facebook is the number one social media advertising platform when it comes to targeting and reach.

Instagram, on the other hand, is gaining popularity and it is next to Facebook, it is a visual social media platform geared towards photos and video sharing.

According to Statista 2018, one of the most popular social media platforms is Instagram.

With over 1 billion users worldwide and more than 500 million people on Instagram, it has gone beyond Facebook in recent days.

So with this huge number of users, advertising on Instagram is definitely a plus for brand promotion

Therefore Instagram is a remarkable social media advertising platform.

For advertising on Instagram, you don’t even need to set up an Instagram account, your Facebook page can serve as the voice of your ad on Instagram.

So if you think your audience is on both Facebook and Instagram the best approach is to activate an Ad Campaign on both networks.

With the power of the Facebook Ads Platform, we can target people by location, age, gender, language, detailed target audience, and connections.

You can also create Instagram story ads by choosing Edit placements and ticking the box for Stories under Instagram.

Instagram supports various ad formats such as story ads, photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, ads in Explore, and so on.

Thus Instagram Ads power every angle of your business to drive effective lead generation and sales.

3. Social Media Advertising on YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google with 2 billion monthly active users worldwide.

So marketers use this social media advertising platform next to text-based Google search ads.

50 million of those users are content creators who upload their own videos to YouTube every day.

So YouTube Advertising is incredible when it comes to promoting your business on the social media network.

There are three video ad categories on YouTube such as:

• TrueView ads: These are the skippable ads that appear at the beginning of YouTube videos.
• Preroll/Non-skippable video ads: As the name suggests these are non-skippable ads, they can be 15 to 20 seconds in duration and there is no way you can stop them unless the ads are run completely.
• Bumper ads: Bumper ads are also a kind of non-skippable ad, which lasts for six seconds at most and appears at the end of YouTube videos.

So with YouTube Advertising, you can expand your digital reach and find customers with advanced targeting.

With YouTube Ads, you have the capability to target videos by Topic, Category, and Keyword.

Additionally, with Placement Targeting, you can identify specific YouTube pages you want your ads to appear on.

A typical ad view on YouTube runs between $0.05 and $0.10, which is low compared to the cost of some keywords on the Search Network, which can run for $50 per click or more.

This means you never pay for people who see your ad but quickly skip it.

4. TikTok Advertising

TikTok is a newly-launched advertising platform app and is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in the world.

With over 500 million active users and running in 155 countries, TikTok proves immense potential for marketers to serve ads with a massive reach and unparalleled engagement level.

TikTok advertising is all about video advertising and is known for its highly engaging 15 to 60-second long user-generated video content.

As cluttered by the young audience it is a preferred advertising platform for several brands.

And because of the massive reach and engagement, you can promote your business on the apps that delight people every day.

Also, there are several targeting options in TikTok that help fine-tune targeting by age, gender, location, devices, language, interest, and time.

When it comes to CPC advertising, TikTok is by far the only video advertising option available.

TikTok ads rates are available on a Cost Per Mille (CPM), Cost Per Click(CPC) as well as a Cost Per View (CPV) basis.

Paid TikTok ads can come in several forms such as :

• Pre-roll ads: Videos that start as soon as users open the app
• In-feed ads: Videos that appear as users scroll
• Promoted hashtag challenges: Videos encouraging user submissions using a custom hashtag
• Branded effects: A custom effect filter for creators to use in videos

5. Linkedin Advertising

LinkedIn is usually a large audience network of professionals and people in the business.

This is one of the reasons that B2B marketers are hovering on the LinkedIn Advertising platform where all the professionals are.

So marketers can run advertising campaigns by clearly defining their goals, such as brand awareness, lead generation, or engagement by selecting a defined objective such as:

• Brand awareness
• Website visits
• Engagement
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Website conversions

Having defined the objective Linkedin Advertising provides different types of advertising formats.

And formats such as Sponsored Content, and Direct Sponsored Content. Sponsored InMail, Text Ads, and Dynamic Ads are the most common types of ads on Linkedin.

LinkedIn advertising is also optimized for effective targeting options. For example, B2B companies can directly target the CEOs of companies and investment firms.

You can also target three unique audiences on LinkedIn based on their interaction Account targeting, Website targeting, and contact targeting.

Isn’t it great, if every marketer wants to talk directly to the CEOs, and not an employee of a company?

Linkedin advertising brings this opportunity to all marketers for those who are advertising on Linkedin.

However, the cost of advertising on LinkedIn is much higher than on other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

6. Twitter Advertising

Twitter is another social networking site used by marketers, reporters, PR Teams, and Individuals where people tweet to communicate in short messages and is also used for microblogging.

It is a blend of instant messaging, blogging, and texting so you will find a majority of tweeters microblog recreationally and also send out useful content.

Tweets explode and travel much faster than any other online media.

Therefore you can use Twitter to connect with your audience in personal and meaningful ways.

Twitter is surrounded by influential people who communicate with tweets and are eager to discover new ideas products and brands.

It is used as a great marketing tool and marketers advertise their recruiting services, consulting businesses, and retail stores by using Twitter.

In fact, 42% of consumers learn about products and services via Twitter, hence marketers use Twitter Advertising to advertise their products or services.

However, your primary focus should be on attracting an audience with useful content and growing brand awareness.

You can advertise on Twitter via “promote mode” and “Twitter ads” such as Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends.

Promoted tweets are paid advertisements that allow you to promote a tweet based on interest or location to get more visitors to your webpage to generate leads.

However, to launch a Twitter Ad campaign, there are several objectives that have to be, they are:

• App installs
• Followers
• Tweet engagements
• Promoted video views
• Website clicks or conversions
• App re-engagements
• In-stream video views (pre-roll)
• Awareness

Targeting on Twitter: 

• Target people who have used a specific word or hashtag
• People who have interacted with your tweets during a week
• Remarket to people with tweet engager targeting
• Target every Twitter user who follows specific accounts with your Twitter ads

7. Social Media Advertising on Snapchat

Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram are the platforms of choice for youngsters who love sharing stories in a fun-loving way.

This is where the young generations of today watch, listen, post, and more likely send a Snapchat Snap or an Instagram Story which lasts for a day.

Snapchat also features augmented reality (AR) which this generation loves to use and personalize their own snaps and shares every day.

Snap claims that more than 70% of its users play with AR each month.

When it comes to advertising, Snapchat is smaller than Facebook and Instagram however it has nearly 200 million daily users, watching 10 billion videos per day.

So if you are a brand that wants to advertise online, Snapchat Advertising is particular about branding where the young generations are more likely to interact with your brand.

The key to advertising success on Snapchat is knowing your target audience. Ads that look natural or normal work far better than professional content on Snapchat.

People also watch 60% of Snapchat ads with their audio on which means users are listening to your message more than half of the time they are viewing it.

Snapchat isn’t for every business however marketers have a huge opportunity to advertise their products and services to connect with the millennials.

There are various ways of Snapchat Advertising that a marketer can use to advertise on Snapchat via the:

• Top Snap Only
• Web View
• App Install
• Long-Form Video
• Deep Link
• Sponsored Lenses
• Sponsored Geo-Filter
• On-Demand Geo-Filter

8. Pinterest Advertising

Pinterest is yet another interesting social media advertising platform where pinners usually come up with new ideas and products.

With Pinterest, people users search for inspiration and create boards they can revisit later with pinned content that interests them.

According to Pinterest, more than 300 million people use Pinterest every single month, and 84% use Pinterest when they’re trying to decide what to buy.

This offers marketers a tremendous opportunity to get in front of more people as they search, browse, and discover on Pinterest.

Pinterest ads appear as Promoted Pins or Pinterest Ads, Promoted Carousel, Promoted Video Pins, and Promoted App Installs.

Pinterest is already essentially a giant search engine, so hashtags don’t really have a place, even on organic Pins.

There are 2 ways in which a promoted pin can work for your business

• Ads can be shown to users who are browsing Pinterest
• Pins can also appear in the search results on Pinterest

The targeting option works with a combination of basic targeting criteria like location, language, gender, and more with interest targeting and keyword targeting.

Once your ads are up and running you can monitor the progress in the ads manager and modify any campaigns that aren’t running well.

The Ad manager shows all the required information needed to analyze a campaign with attributes such as:

• Number of impressions
• The Number of saves
• Number of clicks
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Effective CTR
• Average CPC or CPM
• Total ad spend

In Conclusion:

The above social media platforms are the most widely used paid advertising platforms for the 21st century.

And we do not know what is going to be the next social media boom.

But on the contrary, not all social media platforms are meant for all kinds of businesses.

Therefore I want to conclude with this.

Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram are the best social media platforms for retailers and wholesalers, and that constitutes B2C businesses.

For B2B businesses, Twitter and Linkedin are the best social media platforms, because it is the corporate people’s choice.

And Pinterest and Snapchat are popular in specific countries.

So these are a few social media platforms for direct traffic, demand, and lead generation.

Comments us below if there is any other platform that is missing and that we can add.