If you’re a paid social management chances are you’ve come across paid social ads on your favorite platforms. But how exactly do they work, and how should you incorporate them into your social media marketing strategy?

In its simplest terms, paid social management is the process of setting and tracking goals for your social media advertising campaigns. The goal is to drive brand awareness, traffic, or leads—along with a healthy mix of other metrics.

To set and track these goals, marketers must understand their audiences. They can do this through customer surveys, platform analytics, and Google Analytics. They also have to consider what type of content they want to share, including videos and ephemeral content (like Instagram stories).

Navigating Social Media: Effective Paid Social Management

The ad landscape on social media is rapidly evolving. For example, in the past few years we’ve seen the rise of ephemeral content and video as the dominant formats for paid social. We’ve also seen more sophisticated ad targeting and artificial intelligence to optimize delivery.

As a result, paid social media management is a fast-paced and data-driven field. You’ll need to be able to quickly assess, forecast, propose, and execute paid ad campaigns that produce leads and achieve performance goals for your agency clients. You’ll also need to advance multi-touch measurement and attribution tools for these funnel-aligned campaigns. You’ll have to do this while being nimble and flexible enough to adapt to changing digital marketing trends, platform changes, and other challenges.