Paid Social
Paid social refers to paid advertisements within social networks, delivered in the feed, in stories or in video formats. Unlike organic posts they also reach people who do not follow the profile, and they are steered by criteria such as audience, budget and campaign objective.
In practice
Start with a small budget and a clear objective, for example enquiries through a form, rather than buying broad awareness, which an SME can hardly evaluate meaningfully. The most common mistake is boosting existing posts at the touch of a button, because that largely removes audience control and measurement. Expect the first weeks to generate learning data and results to become dependable only afterwards. Also observe the transparency duties of the Digital Services Act: the platforms must mark advertising as such and disclose who paid for it and by which criteria it is delivered — for you this means recording correct details about the advertiser. Audiences built on specially protected data such as health, religion or political opinion are excluded from advertising.