The answer depends on your type of business, but considering the number of people who use social media—and advertisers’ ability to precisely target specific groups of those people— can be effective not only in terms of reaching your audience, but cost-effective as well.

For business owners who don’t have room in their budgets for more expensive advertising channels, social media ads offer the opportunity to play on a level field with competitors of all sizes. Social media advertising can be used for a wide range of purposes, including:

• Introducing a new product or service
• Driving people to a web page
• Promote an event
• Provide a special offer
• Get people to view your videos
• Bring new people into your sales funnel
• Get people to subscribe to your email list
• Drive visits by local customers to your brick-and-mortar location

Even though measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing and advertising isn’t always straightforward, more than half of businesses use social ads, including 7 million that are buying ads on Facebook, where U.S. users click on eight ads each month. While other platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, can’t boast numbers anywhere near Facebook’s, they’ve all seen significant increases in ad revenue year over year. It’s clear that business owners see social media advertising as an investment they can’t afford to ignore.

The term “social media agency” is often a catch-all phrase for a company that provides one or both of these services:

• Managing their clients’ social media accounts, including writing and publishing content, responding to customers, and tracking engagement metrics
• Managing paid social media advertising, including researching target audiences and their behavior, designing the ads, and testing and revising the ads

Regardless of how an agency refers to itself, the goal is basically the same: Increase the number of people who are exposed to your brand and inspire them to engage with you either by making a purchase or visiting your website to learn more about you.

Simply stated, Facebook ad management is the task of creating and publishing ads. Anyone can do it using Facebook’s own Ads Manager tools, but to get the most out of your budget, a more strategic and robust approach is needed, particularly if you have multiple locations or an out-of-the-ordinary product or service offering. Facebook ad management services can and should be tailored to your business and the people you want to reach, which requires in-depth research into your competitors’ online presences and your audience’s interests, age, profession and more.

Facebook ad management should also include the creation of compelling content that drives your target audience to a defined destination, which may be a landing page designed specifically to continue the customer journey that the initial ads began. For a comprehensive Facebook ad campaign, look for a digital marketing agency that has analysts, social media experts and a talented creative team that can help you get more from your Facebook advertising dollars.

The Facebook Ads Manager facilitates advertising via a “guided creation” process (if you’re new to Facebook advertising) or a “quick creation” process (if you’re familiar with Facebook ads). The ad management tool allows you to:

• Upload your ad creative and write the ad copy
• Preview how your ad will look on various devices
• Set and later edit your audience, budget, creative and more
• Pause, duplicate or relaunch your ad campaigns
• View the results of your Facebook ads to see if they are meeting your goals and are reaching your intended audience

As stated on Facebook’s Ads Help Center, you decide what you want to spend on advertising, then Facebook will “try to get you as any results as possible for that amount. If you want to spend $5 a week, you can. If you want to spend $50,000 a week, you can do that, too.” That may not be helpful when you’re first starting to advertise on Facebook, but keep in mind that you can edit your budget parameters at any time and you’ll be able to track your ads’ performance and adjust them accordingly.

Twitter currently offers two ways to attract attention to your business: Promote Mode and Twitter Ads. The most important difference between the two is that Promote Mode is basically a hands-off, automated way to highlight your business for a flat fee each month while Twitter Ads require hands-on, individual management of your ads.

In general, some of the tasks involved in advertising on Twitter include:

• Determining your budget and setting a launch date
• Selecting how you will tailor your audience according to variables such as location, device, interests, keywords and more
• Choosing your campaign goals, such as website clicks or conversions
• Choosing the format of your ad, such as a plain text Tweet, promoted video, single-image Tweet or GIF

Twitter also offers guidance on best practices for creating your paid Tweet ads and ways to extend the reach of your campaigns with its Twitter Audience Platform.

As with many types of social media advertising, you decide how much you want to spend on a Twitter ad and set your budget during the campaign setup process. You’ll have at least two choices while doing this: total budget and daily maximum. You don’t have to set a total budget, but defining that number ensures you won’t spend anything above it. The daily maximum is how much you want to spend per day. When the maximum you set has been reached for the day, your ads will automatically stop for that day. You can also choose the pace of how your daily budget is spent, either spread out evenly throughout the day or spent as quickly as possible. Twitter offers more details on its auction format that determines how much you will pay for ads.

As Twitter does, Pinterest gives you options. You can either quickly promote a single Pin in just a few steps (choose your targeting, set how long your ad will run, set your budget, and publish your ad) or have more control over your ads and budget with Pinterest Ads Manager.

The Ads Manager process includes:

• Choosing the goal of your campaign—what action you want people to take when they see your ad
• Choosing your targeting options, such as keywords, interests and demographics
• Setting your launch date and budget
• Choosing the Pin you want to promote and set tracking parameters

Before you launch your ad, you’ll have the chance to review and edit it. Be sure to check Pinterest’s advertising guidelines to learn about the types of content that are allowed.

You determine the cost of advertising on Pinterest by setting a bid that defines the maximum amount you are willing to pay for impressions or clicks on your promoted Pins. Pinterest has bid “floors” or minimum amounts for each of its bidding models (cost per click, cost per impression, promoted video, etc.) but you define the “ceiling.” The Pinterest Help Center explains the bidding process in more detail.

If you have a business that sells a product or service to other businesses, LinkedIn may be one of the more important social media advertising platforms for you. According to LinkedIn’s own research, four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions and the audience has more than twice the buying power of the average web audience.

If you don’t already have a free LinkedIn page, you’ll need to create one. If you do have a page, keep in mind that LinkedIn notes in its guide to creating your first campaign that “the LinkedIn relevance score rewards marketers who regularly post content that earns lots of clicks, likes, comments and shares.”

Additional steps to creating a LinkedIn ad include:

• Determining your goal, or the action you want someone to take when they see your ad
• Choosing your format, which may be sponsored content, a display ad, pay-per-click text ads, or sponsored InMail messages
• Setting up your LinkedIn Campaign Manager account
• Defining your maximum budget and choosing either the cost-per-click or cost-per-1,000-impressions pricing model (or the cost-per-send for sponsored InMail messages)

LinkedIn ads also include the ability to track conversions from people who clicked on your ad as well as those who saw it.

YouTube offers both video and non-video ad formats, which include:

• • TrueView ads: These ads are one of the easiest and most affordable ways to start advertising on YouTube. These ads are seen at the beginning of videos and give viewers the immediate option to skip them. You only have to pay for a TrueView ad when the viewer takes an action, such as a click, or the video plays through to the end or for 30 seconds or longer.
  • Non-skippable ads: These ads, as the name implies, does not give the viewer the option to skip them. They either play before the YouTube video begins to play, or in the middle of videos that are 10 minutes or longer. With this format, it’s especially important to carefully target your desired audience.
  • Bumper ads: Another type of non-skippable ad, bumper ads are different in that they last no longer than six seconds, and appear at the end of videos.
  • Overlay ads: These non-video ads are banner ads that usually run along the bottom of a video while it plays.
  • Display ads: These are also non-video ads. They are seen above the list of recommended videos.

Cards and sponsored cards: These small pop-up ads are much less intrusive than other types of ads, appearing in the corner of videos. They can be expanded when they’re clicked.

YouTube, which has evolved into a video search engine, is second only to Google in terms of the numbers of regular users. While YouTube may not strictly follow the most formal definitions of “social media,” it does foster connections among a network of tens of millions of users. If your company is able to produce high-quality videos that reflect your brand and offer something of value to viewers, it’s smart to create a YouTube channel just as you would a Facebook business page or Twitter business account.

In addition to YouTube advertising, you may want to consider developing a solid overall YouTube marketing strategy for getting exposure for your content. Start by doing some research into what your competitors are doing with YouTube and find your own niche in which you can differentiate your brand. You should also do keyword research (as you would with any other type of social media marketing or advertising). Targeting the right keywords can also give your video a better chance of appearing at the top of Google search results, particularly those that offer tutorials or “how-to” information, or reviews of a product or service.

More tips for success: Use SEO best practices when it comes to writing your description and title, use all of your other social media accounts to share your video, embed your videos in your blog posts, and use your email list to promote your videos.

First, you’ll need to decide which type of Instagram ad you want to run. Your choices include:

• Photo ads
• Video ads (up to one minute in length)
• Stories ads, which are tailored to mobile and use the entire screen
• Carousel ads, which allow viewers to swipe to see more photos or videos within the ad
• Collections ads, which combine videos with product catalogs that allow purchases from the app

Each type of Instagram ad has its own creation process. Note that once you choose a format and start the process, you’ll be taken into Facebook Ads Manager since Facebook owns Instagram.

As with Facebook advertising, Instagram ad prices are determined by an auction process. You set the amount you’re willing to spend, and you’ll need to choose the type of Instagram ad format you want to run to view your pricing options. You’ll have other choices to make that will affect your costs, such as whether your ads will appear within an Instagram user’s feed or in their stories.

Instagram also provides three ways to pay for, run and track your ads:

• Within the app, where you simply select a post to promote
• Via Ads Manager, which offers the same tools as Facebook
• Through an Instagram Partner, which are third-party service providers who have been vetted by Instagram