Paid Social Agency: Meta, TikTok & LinkedIn

Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn each reward a different kind of content, and the same studio ad run across all three usually underperforms on all three. Our position is that the strongest paid social creative on Meta and TikTok is rarely made in a studio. It is footage a creator shot for their own account, licensed for paid use and run through the creator’s identity rather than the brand’s. That is what whitelisting and Spark Ads exist to do, and it is where our UGC work meets our paid media work.

What we do

Campaign build and structure for the platform in front of us. Meta gets Advantage+ campaigns built around a tested creative set rather than dozens of ad sets fighting each other for the same audience. TikTok gets Smart+ or manual campaigns structured around a small number of high-signal events, because TikTok’s algorithm needs volume through fewer paths to learn properly. LinkedIn gets Sponsored Content and, where the account has enough scale to justify the cost, Lead Gen Forms, structured around job function and seniority rather than broad interest targeting that wastes B2B budget fast.

Pixel and event set-up before spend goes near an account. Meta Conversions API and browser pixel deduplicated correctly, TikTok Pixel and Events API mapped to the same event set, LinkedIn Insight Tag verified against the conversions the account actually cares about. We will not turn spend on against tracking we have not checked ourselves.

Audience structure built from the account’s own data first: retargeting pools, lookalikes and matched audiences from customer lists, before broad targeting. Broad and Advantage+ audiences still have a place once the pixel has enough signal to feed them, and we set that transition per account rather than defaulting to broad on day one.

Weekly management: creative rotation before fatigue shows up in frequency and CTR, budget moved toward what is converting, and negative or exclusion lists kept current on every platform that supports them.

Creator content as the ad

Most paid social creative fails for a simple reason: it looks like an ad. People scroll past studio production because it reads as paid before the hook lands. Content shot by a creator, in their own format, on their own camera, does not carry that tell. That is the case for testing it against your brand video rather than assuming the polished version wins.

We source this two ways. Through our UGC service, which briefs and casts creators specifically to produce short-form video as ad creative rather than as an organic post: hook-led video, unboxing, testimonial and demo formats, each briefed and shot for the placement it will run in. And through creator partnerships already running organically, where the content already exists and performing posts are worth turning into paid.

Either route, the licence has to explicitly cover paid amplification before we touch the content. A creator’s organic post licence does not automatically let you run it as a paid ad. We check usage rights at the brief stage on UGC work, and we check them again before anything from an existing partnership goes into ad manager.

Whitelisting and Spark Ads

On Meta, whitelisting (partnership ads) lets a brand run paid media through a creator’s own Instagram or Facebook identity, with the creator’s handle, profile picture and social proof attached to the ad. The creator grants ad account access to their content through Meta’s partnership ads tools, and the brand pays and targets it like any other paid placement. The ad reads as the creator’s post because the identity behind it genuinely is the creator’s.

On TikTok, Spark Ads do the equivalent job: a creator’s existing video, boosted as paid media under the creator’s own username, retaining likes, comments and shares that the video already has. A cold-started brand-account ad and a Spark Ads placement of the same footage are not the same product. The accumulated social proof is part of what a viewer responds to.

Both routes need the creator’s consent set up correctly before launch: a partnership ads code on Meta, a Spark Ads authorisation code on TikTok, each with an expiry date we track so a campaign does not go dark mid-flight because a permission lapsed.

Platform by platform

Meta (Facebook and Instagram): the broadest reach of the three, and the place where whitelisted creator content has the most placements to run in, across feed, Stories and Reels. Advantage+ campaigns need a real creative set feeding them, rather than a handful of static assets stretched across every placement.

TikTok: the platform where the creator-native look matters most, because a studio ad is the single fastest way to get scrolled past. Format and pacing are unforgiving. Spark Ads and Smart+ campaigns are built to reward content that already looks like it belongs in the feed.

LinkedIn: the exception to the creator-content rule. B2B decision makers respond to founder and employee voice more than to consumer-style creator content, and targeting by job function, seniority and company size does more of the work than creative format. Lead Gen Forms suit accounts with the volume to justify the CPL, and we say plainly when an account does not have that volume yet.

Testing and reporting

A single creator round should return several testable hooks rather than one polished video, because the hook is usually what separates a winning ad from a losing one, not the product shot behind it. We run creative in small batches against a control, read cost per result and hold rate after enough spend to be meaningful, and rotate out what has stopped moving rather than letting a tired ad run on inertia.

Reporting ties back to what the account actually cares about, leads, bookings or purchases, not reach or impressions dressed up as a headline number. Where a lead comes through a form rather than an e-commerce checkout, we work with whatever CRM or booking system is already in place rather than asking a client to change tools to suit our reporting.

Account standards

The same discipline we run on Google Ads applies here. No spend goes live without verified conversion tracking. Budget pacing is checked against spend targets, not left to run unattended between reports. Creative is retired on a fatigue signal (rising frequency, falling CTR) rather than left running because it performed well three weeks ago. Targets are set from the account’s real margins and CPA, not a platform default. Reporting ties back to leads or revenue, not impressions or reach.

What it costs

Paid social sits on the same management fee as the rest of our paid media work, from £750 a month excluding VAT. The bands are on the paid media pricing page. Media spend and any creator fees for licensed content are billed at cost, with no markup. There is no minimum term, 60 days’ notice, at any point.

An account audit is £450 as a one off, credited against month one if you retain us. If UGC production is part of the plan, that is priced per brief on the UGC service, because format, creator tier and licence term each move the cost on their own.