Facebook Ads vs LinkedIn Ads: which one to choose to rock on social media?

What if “Facebook is the biggest social media” was not enough to win the game? What if the choice was not that obvious? Facebook is all over social media marketers’ strategy… and for a good reason:  why would they go without the world’s biggest social network? It’s like shooting yourself in the foot, isn’t it? 

Well, oddly, it’s not that simple. If you often scroll both social media platforms, you may have seen that the content displayed is a bit different, it’s not exactly the same audience that reads your posts and that the cost of paid advertising varies. 

Well, that’s just a quick glimpse of the differences that can help you decide between Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads, so that you could choose the one that fits best your needs. If you want to get a clear idea of both social advertising platforms and their offers, you’ve come to the right place. This article will help you choose what’s best for your business depending on your marketing strategy, audience and budget.

Facebook Ads: advertising
on the biggest social network

Facebook is the place to advertise if you want to gain visibility and increase your brand’s awareness. With about 2.74 billion monthly active users, this network helps you to reach 59% of the world social networking population.

Online advertising on Facebook can take various forms such as collection ads, carousels, playable, slideshows and many more. If you want to check the list of all available formats on Facebook Ads: check here the list. Below, you can see a typical Facebook carousel that highlights the brand’s campaign’s image and provides a direct link to the website.

Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/fr/publicites-facebook-guide-complet/ 

On Facebook Ads, it’s easy to define your audience to suit the following criteria: location, demographics, behaviour, interests and connections. Facebook Ads is easy to use and full of options. It’s certainly a communication must-have.

LinkedIn Ads: advertising
where business is done

A couple of years ago, LinkedIn opened its own advertising platform: LinkedIn Campaign Manager to go head to head with Facebook! To consider the big picture: LinkedIn was launched in 2002 to create professional networking across the world. On LinkedIn, an ad can reach 13% of the world’s population. 

Nonperformance compared to Facebook you may think? Actually, LinkedIn’s audience is much more qualified. With more than 57 million active companies on the network, LinkedIn was elected the most popular platform of B2B marketers (Marketing Content Institute).

You can access different types of formats (carousel image ad, video ad, dynamic ad…) and many campaign objectives like brand awareness, website visits, engagement, lead generation…

This is what a sponsored LinkedIn Ads can look like. If you want to know more about the different ad formats available on LinkedIn, check LinkedIn’s ads guide:

Thanks to this guide, you can identify your objectives and the supporting ad format that corresponds. Tailored for business purposes, LinkedIn Ads is great for marketers who want to strengthen their brands on the business world stage. Note that according to Demandwave, LinkedIn is the best social media platform for lead generation… enough to outshine Facebook? 

What’s your go-to social media? Our SEA experts would be glad to give you advice on those platforms.

What are the key differences
between Facebook AND LinkedIn ads?

Both platforms are useful right? But your budget is too tight to advertize on both Facebook and LinkedIn? To make the right choice, you should look at the 4 following points that will be clarified underneath: your marketing strategy, the audience you’re targeting, your budget and the analytics provided by the platforms.

#1 - Marketing strategy

B2B? B2C? B2B2C? What kind of relations do you intend to create? Who do you want to reach? With a bigger reach, Facebook Ads is perfect for wide advertising campaigns that are supposed to convert an audience from different demographics and help your brand get known. 

On LinkedIn Ads, the content of your ads should be adapted to the network’s audience. Choose relevant and business-friendly ads to display if you want to advertize for professional purposes.  Here we have two great examples of interesting business-friendly ad formats you should think about:

For instance, those two are sponsored posts; one of them being a free-trial post and the other one, a case study. They are two ads that aim at making the reader act. If you want to make your ads efficient, you should follow our article best practices on How to create an efficient copywriting strategy to improve your conversion rates?

Audience

As you may have understood, Facebook provides a larger audience than LinkedIn… but a more diversified one. Facebook Ads’ targeting options are more developed, allowing you to target the audience that is the most likely to react to your ads. 

On LinkedIn, the audience is business-focused. This platform is recommended if you want to target specific professional demographics. The segmentation options are very precise which allows you to tailor an advanced targeting strategy and thus, increase your conversion rate. Audience attributes go from company growth rate to job member skills. Discover them all to increase your conversions!

Budget

LinkedIn Ads are more expensive than Facebook Ads, and for a reason! It gives you access to a more qualified audience of professionals. The cost difference between the two platforms is nothing to be taken lightly. The average cost-per-click on LinkedIn Ads is more than 5 times the average cost per click on Facebook ($5.26 vs $0.97)!

Analytics options

LinkedIn Analytics is more limited than Facebook Analytics. In addition to the traditional visitor’s and follower’s data, Facebook Analytics can give you a more clear debrief of your ads’ performance in terms of tab visits, top video performance, positive and negative engagement… 

Even-steven?

Actually, the answer is no. On the one hand, you have Facebook Ads that allows massive targeting, low CPC and a wide range of ad formats; and on the other hand, there is LinkedIn Ads, a B2B platform with a smaller but more qualified audience. 

If you’re a BTB company looking for serious leads (and that you are ready to pay the price!), prefer LinkedIn Ads. If you want to reach a wider audience and your budget is less tight, then choose Facebook Ads. 

Even better! If you can experiment and try to advertize on both platforms, you’ll be able to see which one suits your objectives the best. And what about other platforms? How do you cope with multiple social ads platforms? Easier to segment your audience or easier to lose your grip?  

We’d be glad to address this subject with you!