retargeting<\/a> tools.<\/p>\nInstagram<\/strong> \u2014 anything that sells visually: clothing, beauty, food, interiors, travel, property. Pricier impressions are offset by purchase decisions happening right in the feed.<\/p>\nTikTok<\/strong> 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 \u2014 a commercial shot like a TV ad simply gets scrolled past here.<\/p>\nLinkedIn<\/strong> \u2014 B2B, high-value services, recruitment, professional products. The only platform where you can target by job title and company size.<\/p>\nYouTube<\/strong> \u2014 long decision cycles and complex products that need explaining. The format lets you hold attention for longer than a few seconds of feed.<\/p>\nChoosing in Three Steps<\/h2>\n
Instead of guessing, there’s a shorter route.<\/p>\n
Step 1. Describe who makes the decision.<\/strong> Not “women 25-45” but something specific: job, the situation where the need arises, what the person does before buying. A caf\u00e9 owner sourcing coffee beans and a student choosing a face cream live in different corners of the internet.<\/p>\nStep 2. Check whether your audience is there in sufficient volume.<\/strong> Ad platforms show estimated audience size before you launch \u2014 free, five minutes.<\/p>\nStep 3. Work out what you can afford per enquiry.<\/strong> If your average order is $15 and a LinkedIn enquiry will cost $25, the platform doesn’t fit, however good the audience.<\/p>\nThe Common Mistake: Launching Everywhere at Once<\/h2>\n
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 \u2014 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 \u2014 and only then scale to a second.<\/p>\n
The second common mistake is porting creative between platforms unchanged. What works in a Facebook feed looks alien on TikTok and unserious on LinkedIn.<\/p>\n
What You Need to Start<\/h2>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
We wrote about overall budgets and the balance against Google Ads in more detail in what Google Ads and Facebook Ads cost<\/a>.<\/p>\nHow Long a Campaign Needs to Warm Up<\/h2>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 every substantial edit restarts learning from zero.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Formats That Work on Each Platform<\/h2>\n
\n\n| Platform<\/th>\n | What works<\/th>\n | What to avoid<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n |
\n| Facebook<\/td>\n | Feed image or carousel, lead forms<\/td>\n | Long copy with no visual hook<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
\n| Instagram<\/td>\n | Stories and Reels, vertical video<\/td>\n | Horizontal banners repurposed from the site<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
\n| TikTok<\/td>\n | Vertical video that looks person-made, unglossy<\/td>\n | A finished TV commercial<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
\n| LinkedIn<\/td>\n | Copy with a concrete figure or takeaway, documents<\/td>\n | Emotional creative and humour<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
\n| YouTube<\/td>\n | The point in the first 5 seconds, detail after<\/td>\n | A long logo intro<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n 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.<\/p>\n An Example From Practice<\/h2>\nA 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 \u2014 and the TikTok question dropped away on its own, because scaling what already worked made more sense.<\/p>\n The moral isn’t that TikTok is bad. It’s that platforms are chosen for audiences, not for fashion.<\/p>\n Social Versus Search: When to Use Which<\/h2>\nThe difference is fundamental, and confusing the two is expensive. In search, someone has already articulated a need and is looking for a solution \u2014 you’re catching existing demand. On social, they weren’t looking for anything; you’re interrupting their feed and have to create interest.<\/p>\n The practical conclusion: if people actively search for your product on Google, start with search advertising \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Organic or Paid: Can You Do Without a Budget<\/h2>\nYou 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n |