It’s 2018, so businesses know they need to have an active presence on social media. They have profiles on multiple platforms and update them on a daily basis.

While this is definitely necessary for survival, it’s not quite enough.

Companies that want to take their social media strategies to the next level also pay for advertisements.

Facebook alone has more than six million advertisers on its platform. In September 2017, Instagram hit two million monthly paid advertisers.

That’s because it’s become very easy to set up ads to target a specific demographic. It’s hard for businesses to turn down this type of precision in targeting.

Just look at how simple these options are for marketers who want to advertise on Facebook:

In addition to being able to reach such a precise audience, Facebook also makes it easy for you to set your budget. You can set it up on a daily or weekly basis. It’s also possible for brands to manage their budgets based on the lifetime of each ad.

There are also many different options for the type of ad you want to run.

It’s easy to experiment to find out what works best for your company based on the demographic you’re targeting.

Research shows that by the year 2020, social media advertisements will surpass newspaper ad spending.

I anticipate that more companies will allocate a larger portion of their marketing budgets to paid social media ads in 2018.