Let’s look at the benefits of paid social media for your care business. Organic posts on Facebook and Instagram are commonplace in the care sector, and this has a range of benefits from keeping families up-to-date with events to sharing the day-to-day lives of your residents and latest news.

However, paid social media is often overlooked due to lack of budgets or priority, but it can
actually support your business goals.

1. You can reach new audiences

Unfortunately, unless you run a competition for likes and shares, it’s not often that Facebook will show your organic posts to people outside the followers of your page. But, paid social media gives you the chance to expand your audience and show your posts to a much wider audience, even if they don’t already follow your Facebook page or Instagram profile.

2.Is Paid Social Media cost-effective?

Promoting your posts to a wider audience can be done for as little as £1 a day. You can also
create ads using posts that don’t appear on your page, but are used for advertising. These
are ideal if you’re opening a new home, trying to fill beds or running a recruitment drive.

3.Unbeatable targeting options

As we said above, the reach of organic social media campaigns is often limited to your
current followers. Facebook and Instagram’s targeting options are unbeatable in terms of
social media platforms. They also both have enormous market shares, and are the places that you’re most likely to find your audience – other than on search engines such as Google, of course!

Using social media, you can find your target audience by targeting with the following options:

• Location (and proximity to your business)
• Demographics such as age and gender
• Language
• Hobbies and interests
• Their job title or job role.

This targeting means that only people who meet these criteria will see your adverts, so you won’t waste your daily budget on people unlikely to engage.

4.Plenty of options

Paid social ads give you a bit more flexibility than organic posts. Because of the acquisition
of Instagram by Facebook, you can create ads for both networks from the Facebook Ads
Manager. You can also run the same ad on both platforms, making managing your
advertising across multiple platforms super simple.

Depending on your goal, you can optimise your ads for certain results.

These include:

• Maximising traffic to your website
• Optimising the volume of people who see your ad
• Increasing engagement on your ad such as likes, comments and share
• Driving sales or donations
• Generating leads.

This means that you can do everything with paid social ads from recruitment and running competitions to sharing open days, recruiting staff and filling beds. You will also find different options for the format of your ads, from image carousels to 30 second videos.

If you’re ready to get started with organic and/or paid social media, we’ve got years of
experience in all-things marketing for the care sector. To speak to our care home marketing experts, get in touch today.