⚡ Quick answer: The cost gap between platforms is eightfold. TikTok runs $4-8 per thousand impressions, Meta $8-14, LinkedIn $20-45. That doesn’t make TikTok the better buy: a cheap impression served to the wrong audience costs more than an expensive one served to the right person. Choose the platform by where your customer makes decisions, not by cost per click. For B2B, expensive LinkedIn frequently pays back better than cheap Facebook.
“Which social network should we advertise on” sounds like a simple question, and getting it wrong costs the entire budget. We covered where to start with social media marketing and how Facebook advertising works separately — this piece is about something else: choosing between platforms, and why cheaper isn’t better.
| Platform | CPM (per 1,000 impressions) | CPC (per click) |
|---|---|---|
| TikTok | $4-8 | low |
| X (Twitter) | $5-10 | ~$0.40 |
| ~$8.8 | ~$1.23 | |
| ~$14.4 | ~$0.94 | |
| YouTube | $10-18 | format-dependent |
| $20-45 | $2-5.3 |
These are global averages; in smaller markets they run lower thanks to thinner auction competition. But the proportions between platforms hold: LinkedIn stays several times more expensive than the rest.
One more trend worth building into planning: average CPM across social platforms rose 8-12% year over year. Advertising is getting more expensive, and the budget that sufficed last year buys fewer impressions now.
The logic of “let’s take TikTok, impressions are three times cheaper” collapses on simple arithmetic. If none of those thousand cheap impressions reached someone who decides on industrial machinery purchases, you paid less and got nothing.
LinkedIn costs $20-45 per thousand impressions precisely because it holds an audience that’s hard to reach elsewhere: executives, procurement, HR. For a B2B service with a deal value in the thousands, one enquiry justifies hundreds of expensive impressions.
What you should be counting isn’t cost per impression but cost per enquiry — and then cost per customer, because enquiries from different platforms convert into deals at different rates: cheap contacts from a broad audience often reach payment half as often as expensive, precisely targeted ones.
Facebook remains the broadest in reach and the deepest in targeting. Works for local services, mass-market products, audiences over 30. It also carries the most mature retargeting tools.
Instagram — anything that sells visually: clothing, beauty, food, interiors, travel, property. Pricier impressions are offset by purchase decisions happening right in the feed.
TikTok delivers the cheapest reach and a younger audience. Suits mass-market products, entertainment, educational offers. The one condition is being able to produce video that looks organic — a commercial shot like a TV ad simply gets scrolled past here.
LinkedIn — B2B, high-value services, recruitment, professional products. The only platform where you can target by job title and company size.
YouTube — long decision cycles and complex products that need explaining. The format lets you hold attention for longer than a few seconds of feed.
Instead of guessing, there’s a shorter route.
Step 1. Describe who makes the decision. Not “women 25-45” but something specific: job, the situation where the need arises, what the person does before buying. A café owner sourcing coffee beans and a student choosing a face cream live in different corners of the internet.
Step 2. Check whether your audience is there in sufficient volume. Ad platforms show estimated audience size before you launch — free, five minutes.
Step 3. Work out what you can afford per enquiry. If your average order is $15 and a LinkedIn enquiry will cost $25, the platform doesn’t fit, however good the audience.
Wanting to “try every platform and see which works” sounds prudent, but in practice it means the budget splits four ways, and each part is too small to train the algorithm. Ad systems need a certain number of conversions to learn who to show ads to — typically dozens of actions per week per campaign. Spread a monthly budget across four platforms and you hit that minimum on none of them, get uniformly poor results everywhere, and conclude wrongly that social advertising doesn’t work. At Netloria we advise the opposite in these cases: pick one platform, give it the whole budget for two or three months, drive it to an acceptable cost per enquiry — and only then scale to a second.
The second common mistake is porting creative between platforms unchanged. What works in a Facebook feed looks alien on TikTok and unserious on LinkedIn.
The minimum budget on which anything can be learned depends on click costs in your niche, but the order of magnitude is: $300-500 a month per campaign for Facebook or Instagram, from $1,000 for LinkedIn, where every click costs several times more.
Less than that means paying for a test that won’t produce a statistically meaningful result. Better to wait and launch properly than spend $100 and draw conclusions from ten clicks.
We wrote about overall budgets and the balance against Google Ads in more detail in what Google Ads and Facebook Ads cost.
The most common reason advertising “didn’t work” is that it was switched off too early. At launch the algorithm operates blind: it doesn’t yet know who in your audience responds, so it shows ads broadly, spending budget on finding patterns.
That learning phase typically runs from a few days to two weeks, and it’s exactly when cost per enquiry is highest. The working rule: don’t draw conclusions before the campaign has gathered several dozen conversions, and don’t change settings daily — every substantial edit restarts learning from zero.
Hence the micro-budget problem: on $50 a campaign never exits the learning phase, and you’re judging the results of its most expensive period.
| Platform | What works | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Feed image or carousel, lead forms | Long copy with no visual hook | |
| Stories and Reels, vertical video | Horizontal banners repurposed from the site | |
| TikTok | Vertical video that looks person-made, unglossy | A finished TV commercial |
| Copy with a concrete figure or takeaway, documents | Emotional creative and humour | |
| YouTube | The point in the first 5 seconds, detail after | A long logo intro |
One thing is common to every platform: creative fatigues. The same ad shown to the same audience performs worse after three or four weeks simply because people have seen it. Refreshing creative isn’t a one-off task, it’s a standing line in the budget.
A telling case: a local made-to-order furniture manufacturer arrived wanting to launch on TikTok, because “it’s cheap and everyone’s there.” Their audience is 35-55, mid-renovation, with an average order over $1,000 and a decision cycle of several months. Those people do exist on TikTok, but reaching them there is more expensive than it appears: a cheap impression doesn’t compensate for most views landing on an audience that doesn’t buy bespoke furniture at all. At Netloria we proposed starting with Facebook and Instagram plus retargeting on people who’d browsed the catalogue, and shelving the TikTok budget until the main channel reached a stable cost per enquiry. Two months later cost per enquiry on Meta came in at half the client’s original expectation — and the TikTok question dropped away on its own, because scaling what already worked made more sense.
The moral isn’t that TikTok is bad. It’s that platforms are chosen for audiences, not for fashion.
The difference is fundamental, and confusing the two is expensive. In search, someone has already articulated a need and is looking for a solution — you’re catching existing demand. On social, they weren’t looking for anything; you’re interrupting their feed and have to create interest.
The practical conclusion: if people actively search for your product on Google, start with search advertising — it produces results faster. If demand doesn’t exist yet, because the product is new or people don’t know the service exists, social becomes the primary channel, since that’s where you can explain the need.
In most mature businesses both channels run, but in different roles: search collects the ready, social builds demand and brings back those who didn’t buy first time.
You can, but slowly, and not in every niche. Organic reach on social has been falling for years: platforms make money on advertising and show unpaid posts to an ever-smaller share of followers.
The workable combination for most small businesses isn’t either-or but a division of roles. Organic maintains trust and shows the company is alive: reviews, work in progress, the people behind it. Advertising brings in new people who don’t follow you yet.
Advertising also suffers without organic: someone clicks an ad, opens the profile, sees three posts in a year, and leaves. The profile works as a landing page, and its condition affects ad conversion as much as the creative does.
If you’re unsure which platform to start with — tell us about the product and your average order value. We’re a web studio based in Ukraine, and we’ll work out which platform has a chance of paying back given your economics rather than proposing all of them at once.
