Social media advertising presents social media managers with a whole host of challenges, from messy reporting to difficulty collaborating across platforms. Fear no more, these tips and tricks will help you find a more intuitive solution.

There’s so much to like about being a social media manager.

First of all, it’s creative: from storytelling to community building to choosing the perfect creative to adding filters and sounds – this is not a boring job. 

Another perk of the job is that it allows you to spend lots of hours scrolling your favorite social media feeds. This is a must if you want to keep up with trends and best practices from other brands and key influencers.

Finally, being a social media manager involves almost instant gratification: likes, shares, mentions, and new followers are all real-time metrics that can show how good a job you’re doing.

On the other hand, there are some other aspects of the job not everyone likes. One of them is social media advertising.

Although many companies have a specific team focused on paid ads, it’s common for social media managers to also be involved, specifically when it comes to putting budget behind particularly successful social media posts.

So, what are the challenges social media managers face when it comes to social media advertising, and what are some of the ways you can tackle them and learn to love the practice?

Social media advertising: The challenges

Ads managers are overly complicated

The problem starts at the very beginning. You open your business ad manager profile and you immediately feel overwhelmed.

These tools don’t tend to be super intuitive or user friendly – it’s hard to find your way in, and there are a ton of settings you need to choose from before you can actually set your ad live. This is very different from how organic posts work. Social media advertising is no piece of cake.

1. It’s all about the money

The main difference between organic and paid is, well, money. 

This can make things a little intimidating – spending company money always adds a layer of pressure. Ads results are tightly linked to ROI and lead generation results, and that calls for some solid performance reporting. All of this brings us to the next point:

2. Reporting is crucial, but it’s also messy

Although measuring organic results is crucial, reporting becomes even more important when money is involved. Your manager will want to see clean reports, where it’s easy to track performance of different ads, evaluate how they affect ROI, and ultimately use the insights to improve future campaigns. It can get a bit messy to collect all ad results in one clean dashboard without forgetting a variation, channel, or network along the way. And you need to do this every week.

3. Paid and organic activities are often siloed

Although they’re called ‘ads’, they’re still social media posts at the end of the day. It makes sense to have organic and paid posts in the same place, with no need to go back and forth when setting up a campaign, choosing creatives, or comparing results and metrics. If you can have an overview of both your organic social media and paid posts in one tool, then it’ll be much easier for you to check which organic posts are successful and decide to 'boost' them or turn them into ads.

4. Communication with colleagues is not easy

Finally, communication can get messy when talking about ads, A/B testing, and creative assets. Not all your colleagues will have access to each channel and business manager, but many of them will need to be informed of results and performance of ads. This enables the best-performing variants to be replicated for further success. 

No-hassle ways to leverage social media advertising

The list above gives social media managers all the reasons to loathe ads… but we’re here to challenge this myth and help you overcome your fear of social media advertising. Here are some tips and tricks to overcome all those challenges.

1. Newsflash: You don’t have to use an ads manager platform!

Who said you need to use an ads business manager? 

There are plenty of options for social media managers, and you can use more intuitive, lighter versions of them, like Brandwatch’s Advertise tool. Here you can create campaigns, ad sets, and ads in a matter of minutes, and then easily report on results across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. As a social media manager, you likely won’t need all the functionalities of a business manager, so why make your life more complicated?

2. Report across channels and schedule reports

The best way to make your job easier is to have a solid reporting system where you can track performance on different channels, get a quick overview of all your campaigns, and track performance on post level. 

A great way to overcome the sense of urgency that comes with reporting is the ability to schedule reports. This way, you can make sure your boss/clients and different stakeholders will receive your report in their mailbox on a regular basis. In Brandwatch’s Social Media Management solution, you’ll find reporting tools in both Advertise and Measure, that can make your life easier.

3. Keep organic and paid in one place

You’ll likely want to keep track of your owned social media accounts in a way where you can also see how your paid activity is performing alongside your organic posts. By doing this, you can easily identify best performing social media posts, back them up with ads, and in turn, generate more successful campaigns. Comparing organic and paid performance from one place also saves you time – less clicking around different tools and tabs means you have a holistic view at your fingertips.

In Brandwatch’s Social Media Management solution, the Advertise module works together seamlessly with Publish, our social content management system. The two are like bread and butter when it comes to boosting social media posts.

4. Collaborate using a single source of truth

To make communication way easier, it’s ideal to grant your team members access to the tool you’re using to run ads. To make this super intuitive, you might want to assign them different roles, so settings are hidden, but your team members can see all the performance metrics they need. 

For example, on Advertise you can choose to assign three different roles: Analyst, Promoter, and Advertiser. These work great for giving team members just the right amount of access and insight they need.

Making life easier for social media managers

We’ve recently been working on some important changes in our product, all focused on one key objective: making it easier for social media managers to run ads, so they can tie their social advertising to their social media strategy. 

We’ve focused on simplifying workflows and made it very easy for you to create campaigns, ad sets, and ads in Advertise. At the same time, we’ve improved the flow that allows users to easily promote content from Publish, where their organic posts live.

All this makes social media advertising more accessible for relevant teams. See, it’s not so scary after all.