Social media has been an absolute game changer for businesses. With your Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube account, you can reach people worldwide, connect with existing customers, reinforce your brand identity, and drive sales. It’s no surprise then that so many businesses look to grow their social media following. After all, when measuring business success, social media performance often comes into play.
It’s not unusual for an article or review of a business to note how many followers it has on Instagram alongside its transaction volume or how much it raised. But should you turn to ads for growing your blockchain social media following or for overall Web3 marketing efforts?
How Social Media Ads Can Grow Your Following
Virtually every social media platform lets users run ads. After all, this is essentially how they make money and stay profitable. From feed ads to story ads and more, there are many ways to advertise.
Even better, you can target your advertising. Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and other platforms let you target people based on interests. So, you’re not simply targeting 25- to 45-year-olds but potentially 25- to 45-year-old men in a major U.S. city who have already engaged with blockchain-related content. This means more chances of your campaign succeeding and converting.
There are multiple actions you can optimize your social media ads for, including following your brand, going to your landing page, making a sale, and so on. So, you might wonder, why not just use social media ads to grow your following significantly? This means you can build a community virtually overnight rather than spending weeks and months painstakingly acquiring them. But it might not be that simple.
Pros Of Using Ads To Grow Your Blockchain Social Media
Of course, there are many benefits to using ads to grow your social media, some of which are as follows:
- Saved Time: Anyone who has done organic crypto social media management or community building will tell you that it takes time. Some accounts don’t begin to see traction for months, sometimes years, after the first launch. This includes experimenting with different content formats, engaging with the community every single day, following trends, creating a unique voice, and so on. But when you opt for ads, you can get your content seen immediately rather than hoping the algorithm rewards your efforts.
- Targeting the Right Audience: Anyone trying to build this social media following has probably received one of those spam follows from irrelevant accounts. It’s also possible that, despite all the effort you put into building a community, you initially attract the wrong crowd, meaning you have to go back to the drawing board. But with social media ads, you choose the exact type of person you want to see your content. You can exclude geographic regions that aren’t relevant to your business, hyper-focus on specific interests, and more.
- A/B Testing: From a marketing perspective, social media ads to grow your blockchain following also let you test different content formats. While you’re still figuring out what works, you can run ads for different content formats immediately and see how the public responds. This means you can learn what works and what doesn’t, then adjust accordingly.
Cons Of Using Ads To Grow Your Blockchain Social Media
Even with all of these benefits, there are a few downsides that you might want to be aware of:
Reduced Learning Curve: As we’ve said, building a social media presence and managing a community entirely from scratch is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. But in many cases, that time matters, and the work is necessary. A business that has to go through several types of content before it figures out what works will come out the other side more knowledgeable about its own brand and audience.
If you can guarantee visibility from the first reel or post you make, you might not realize its flaws. Sometimes, you need the market to reject your content or ideas to tell you what isn’t working.
Community Quality: Building a community organically is less convenient, but it can mean higher quality. Someone who joins your community at the very beginning and sees the brand evolve in real time might feel a stronger connection than someone who happened to come across it in your feed. Not having guaranteed visibility through ads sometimes forces businesses and their marketing teams to work harder. This means more intentional community outreach, more innovation with their content, and much more.
No Guarantee of Results: While social media can help you reach the right people, it doesn’t guarantee the response you’re looking for. You can pump thousands of dollars into ads and have your business seen by 10,000 people, but if the content isn’t compelling or you haven’t built an interesting brand identity, people simply might not take action. The marketing sector is full of businesses sinking obscene amounts of money into social media ads without checking content quality. Some of these companies get trapped in the loop of always paying for ads without looking at the creative side.
How To Strike The Balance
None of this is to suggest that ads to grow a blockchain social media are a silver bullet everyone should utilize or is a waste of time and money. Instead, it is to indicate that businesses have to find a balance between the two.
First, you should not launch your social media with ads off the bat. Even if ads will be part of your strategy, you should ideally start the first few weeks and months by posting content and testing the market organically. If a certain content type doesn’t work, you haven’t spent thousands of dollars promoting it. This also trains you and your marketing team not to outsource performance entirely to ads but to focus on organic connections with the audience.
You should also be very intentional about how you design your ads. You can reach out to an agency like us at Proleo.io, with years of experience running paid social ads. After all, it’s not just a matter of setting the location and target demographic; many smaller factors contribute to success.
Finally, don’t treat acquiring followers through social media ads as the be-all and end-all. Once you bring the people in, you have to give them a reason to stay. This means engaging content, community outreach, and so on. Together, these can create a loyal audience that engages with your business on and off social media.
