Paid Social 101 

Social media arguably plays an unknowing role in every single person’s life. And… whether you engage with it on a personal or a professional level, it is likely you have been targeted with paid social marketing at some point in your life.  

In a day and age where we are constantly inundated with information, this form of paid advertising for either products, services or brands allows your business to target the audience that is the most likely to be interested in what you have to offer, and is one of the best restaurant marketing methods available to us today. Paid social allows a business to identify specific audiences within your market – whether this be by age, gender, region to name a few – to then target them with particular messages or offers.  

Below we’ve summarised a quick 411 on some of the top tips of successful paid social campaign – but do get in touch if you want to find out more…  

To start, typically, a business will go to a third-party site, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. To gain access in order to optimise paid social campaigns, business manager needs to be set up. This has multifaceted benefits as this enables your social media pages to be registered as business pages by Instagram and Facebook, and thus allows you to advertise, and to optimise your pages.  

Once you have business manager set up for your business, and you’ve attached an ad account to your business page, you can put money behind an organic post, to boost the post. Arguably this is the simplest way to boost your profile as you target people already following the page, but it makes sure the selected post can appear at the top of their news feed. Boosted posts differ from a generic paid ad, as they aren’t created in an Ads manager. The content reach then appears higher than it would have done organically, therefore increasing engagement.  

Alternatively, some prefer to use targeted ads in the form of dark posts. These posts are unpublished on the feed, but appear for a specifically targeted audience. These posts cannot be found organically and are most used to ensure the feed doesn’t become flooded with too many promotional posts. Dark ads are all created within ads manager and can even be further optimised to appear on a greater number of pages. 

If you want to find out more about how paid social can help you to achieve the best restaurant marketing, drop us a note or give us a call on 020 3301 5305