Paid social media advertising: the basics for organisations

Paid social media advertising means paying a platform to show your content to people beyond those who already follow you. For organisations, it is a way to put an important film, report launch or event in front of a defined audience at a defined time, rather than hoping it will be shared.

Most platforms offer two routes. The first is to promote a post you have already published. LinkedIn, for example, describes boosting as a way to amplify existing content, and it can be applied to company page posts, personal posts and events.¹ The second is a full campaign built in an advertising tool, which LinkedIn calls Campaign Manager.¹ Its main in-feed format, Sponsored Content, includes single image, video, carousel, document and event ads.² If you are planning Facebook ads for nonprofits, the same principles apply; we use LinkedIn's published guidance as the worked example here.

Every paid campaign should answer one question: what do we want people to do? LinkedIn's own guidance says that before you create a campaign, you must select an objective that aligns with your overall goals.³ Treat it as the first decision of the campaign, not a setting to fill in at the end.

Translate your communication goal into a single action. Do you want people to watch a short film, visit a report page, register for a webinar or follow your page? Each is a different objective. Trying to achieve awareness, sign-ups and donations with one ad usually means achieving none of them well. If you have several goals, run several small campaigns, each with its own audience, creative and measure of success.

Set the budget and the end date at the same time as the objective. A short campaign with a fixed total and a clear finish is easier to judge than an open-ended one, and it forces the team to agree in advance what result would justify running it again. Write the objective, audience, dates and success measure on one page before anything is built.

Boosting posts suits content that is already performing well, time-sensitive announcements and event promotion. LinkedIn notes that events can be promoted before, during or after they take place, and that boosting needs no complex setup.¹ It is the sensible starting point for a small team.

A full campaign is worth the extra effort when you need precise ad targeting, several versions of an ad, or conversion tracking on your website. It also lets you test. LinkedIn's Direct Sponsored Content, for instance, lets you personalise and test ads for specific audiences without publishing them on your page.² In our own practice, we often boost a strong organic post first, then build a campaign around the version that people engaged with most.

Good ad targeting starts with the audience you described in your communication strategy, not with every option the platform offers. Narrow too far and the ad barely runs. LinkedIn sets a minimum audience of 300 members to run a campaign, and for best scale suggests an audience of 50,000 or more for single image and text ads.⁴

Platforms also let you reach people you already know. LinkedIn's Matched Audiences can find people from a list of your contacts, by company or through recent engagement, and Audience Expansion finds similar professionals.⁴ Uploading a contact list, however, means processing personal data. Rwanda's data protection law defines consent as a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of a person's wishes, and gives people the right to ask for processing for direct marketing to stop.⁵ Check that your lists were collected on a basis that allows this use.

• Define the audience by role, location, language and interest before opening the ad tool.
• Exclude people who already took the action, such as existing subscribers.
• Avoid targeting or messaging that implies sensitive traits, which the law defines to include health status, political opinion and beliefs.⁵
• Keep a short record of each audience, its source and the date it was created.

People scroll quickly, so the first frame and the first line of text carry most of the message. State the point early, show a real person or a clear result, and end with one call to action that matches your objective.

Caption every video. W3C notes that captions provide content to people who are Deaf or cannot hear the audio, and are also used by people who process written information better than audio.⁶ Do not rely on automatic captions without review: W3C warns that they often fail to match the spoken audio and should be treated as a draft to check.⁶ Prepare two or three versions of the image, headline or opening seconds so you can see which one people respond to.

Paid promotion puts a person's image in front of many more people than an organic post, often in places they never expected. Bond's ethical content guidelines state that, without evidence of informed consent, images should not be used for any promotion or fundraising purposes.⁷ The same guidelines advise telling contributors who is likely to see their content and that it may remain online for a long time.⁷

Before boosting a post that features a community member, check the consent form covers advertising, not just publication. If a story is sensitive, or the person is a child, consider whether paid reach is appropriate at all. A strong film can still be promoted using shots that do not identify vulnerable people.

Decide what success looks like before the campaign starts, and choose metrics that match the objective. For a video campaign, look at completed views rather than impressions. For a report or registration page, look at visits and completed actions on your website.

To track actions on your own site, platforms provide a tracking code. On LinkedIn this is the Insight Tag, which tracks leads and conversions from your ads.² LinkedIn's guidance also covers connecting offline data to measure results further down the funnel.³ Review results weekly, pause versions that are not working, and record what you learned so the next campaign starts from evidence, not guesswork.

• One objective, written as a single action
• A defined audience of a workable size
• Contact lists collected on a lawful basis
• Consent forms that cover paid promotion
• Captions checked by a person on every video
• Two or three creative versions to compare
• Tracking code installed and tested before launch
• Results reviewed weekly and lessons recorded