Social Networks and Social Ads: from liking to selling

Let’s be brutally honest for a moment. Your CFO doesn’t care how many “hearts” your latest photo has on Instagram. He doesn’t care if your video on TikTok went viral if that didn’t translate into a positive line on the bottom line at the end of the month. For too long, we’ve lived in the bubble of vanity metrics, confusing popularity with profitability.

But the game has changed. Social networks and Social Ads are no longer mere branding or “brand awareness” channels, but powerful direct sales tools. If today your company is still publishing content waiting for “magic to happen” without a payment structure and technology behind it, you’re losing money. Literally.

At Inprofit, we work with brands that have understood that the Facebook wall or LinkedIn feed are not places to hang posters, but transactional environments. The user no longer wants to leave the app to buy; they want immediacy. And this is where most SMEs and companies fail: they continue to design obsolete strategies.

The purpose of this article is to change your mind: we are going to stop talking about Community Management and start talking about Social Commerce and Performance Marketing.

The end of organic outreach and the birth of the “Pay-to-Play”.

There is an uncomfortable reality that we must accept: organic reach is in the ICU. Platforms like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok or LinkedIn are listed companies that need to monetize. That’s why they have turned off the tap of free visibility to force brands to invest in advertising.

Is this a bad thing? Not at all. In fact, it’s a golden opportunity if you know how to play it.

In becoming a “Pay-to-Play” environment, platforms have refined their advertising algorithms to astounding levels. The Social Ads allow us a targeting capability that traditional advertising (TV, radio, print) never dreamed of.

It’s no longer about throwing a net into the sea to see what fish fall in. It’s about using a laser harpoon. Thanks to the artificial intelligence of advertising platforms, we can hit exactly the right fish:

• The person who visited your pricing page yesterday but did not buy.
• Users with an identical profile (Lookalike) to your current best customers.
• People who are actively looking for solutions like yours in real time.

At Inprofit, we transform advertising spend into a returnable investment. When the social media strategy as a direct sales channel is well executed, every euro you put into the machine should return more than a euro. That’s scaling.

Social Commerce: Eliminating friction is the key to success

Did you know that every additional click you force a user to make reduces your chances of a sale by 50%? Friction is the number one enemy of conversion.

This is where the concept of Social Commerce. Platforms are integrating payment gateways and catalogs directly into their interfaces. Instagram Shopping or TikTok Shop are not “frills”, they are POS (Point of Sale Terminals) integrated into your customer’s pocket.

A winning direct selling strategy in networks must seek “zero friction”.

How do we achieve this technically?

Simply uploading a product photo is not enough. You need a robust Martech integration:

1. Dynamic Catalogs: Your stock on the web should synchronize in real time with your Facebook or Instagram store. If you sell the last pair of shoes on the web, the ad should stop showing automatically.
2. Product Labeling: Every visual content must be“shoppable“. The user sees, touches and buys.
3. Post-Click Experience: If you take the user out of the social network (to a Landing Page), that page should load in milliseconds and maintain the same visual aesthetics of the ad. Visual consistency increases trust and, therefore, the sale.

Expert’s note: The modern user is impatient. If your Social Ads strategy takes them to a generic homepage instead of the specific product they saw in the ad, you’ve lost the sale and wasted the click budget.

Advanced Social Ads strategies for direct sales

Forget about the “Promote post” button. That’s a waste of money. For social networks to work as a direct sales channel, we need to operate from the Business Manager with Full Funnel strategies.

At Inprofit we apply tactics that go far beyond the basics, using technology to maximize ROAS (Return on Advertising Investment):

Sequential Retargeting: The intelligent chase

98% of users do not buy on the first visit. The money is in the follow-up. But it’s not about bombarding with the same boring ad. We design sequences:

• Day 1: Educational/inspirational video ad (Discovery).
• Day 3 (if interacted): Carousel ad with product benefits (Consideration).
• Day 7 (if you visited the website): Ad with customer testimonial and limited offer (Decision).

UGC Ads (User Generated Content)

Advertising that looks like advertising sells less than advertising that looks like organic content. Ads created with “amateur” aesthetics, unboxing or real testimonials recorded with a cell phone, have much higher conversion rates than ultra-produced corporate spots. Authenticity sells.

Conversational Commerce (WhatsApp and DMs)

Sometimes, direct selling needs a human push or a smart bot. Click-to-WhatsApp or Click-to-Messenger campaigns are brutally effective for high-value services or products (High Ticket). Initiating a conversation is the step before closing a deal. Implementing AI chatbots that qualify the lead before passing it to a human salesperson is one of the specialties of our Martech area.

The measurement challenge: Where does the sale come from?

This is the Achilles heel of many agencies. With privacy updates (such as iOS 14.5 and the end of third-party cookies), knowing where a sale is coming from is harder than ever. If you don’t measure well, you can’t optimize.

To consider social networks as a reliable direct sales channel, we need a solid data infrastructure. Browser Pixel is no longer enough.

At Inprofit we implement solutions such as the Conversions API (CAPI). This allows your server to talk directly to the Facebook or TikTok server, sending purchase data securely and without relying on user cookies. This recovers 15% to 20% of lost data, which means your campaigns are actually more profitable than you thought.

Attribution is key. Understanding which ad initiated the sale and which closed the sale allows you to allocate your budget in a scientific, not intuitive way.

Data-Driven Creative (Data-Driven Creative)

We bring the two worlds together again: creativity and data. In Social Ads, creativity is the new segmentation. As algorithms are becoming more and more automatic looking for audiences, your best tool to filter your ideal customer is the ad itself.

If you sell software for architects, your ad should say “Software for Architects” in the first 3 seconds. The algorithm will read your video and search for those people.

We must produce creativities in an agile way. Test, measure, discard what doesn’t work and scale what does. It is a constant iterative process. What worked last month may be saturated today. Creative freshness is mandatory to keep acquisition costs low.

Is your company ready to sell or just to be?

Social media has matured. Your competition is no longer just “posting”; they are aggressively selling, capturing leads and automating closing processes.

Having active social profiles without a direct sales and Social Ads strategy is like having a Ferrari and using it only to listen to the radio in the garage. You have the power, you have the tool, but you’re not moving.

At Inprofit, we understand the frustration of seeing time and resources invested in networks without seeing a clear return. That’s why our approach is radically different: technology, measurement and sales. We are as obsessed with your bottom line as you are.

Don’t let the algorithm decide your fate. Take control of your traffic and your sales.

Do you want to turn your social networks into your main source of income?