Social media advertising is vital for online businesses, so all entrepreneurs should be looking into it. Is there a right time to start advertising? What happens if we don’t have a big online following yet? Do we need to be hesitant to use retargeted advertising? On this episode, host of The Art of Online Business podcast, Rick Mulready, shares how to advertise effectively on social media.    It’s never too early to start using ads. Start running them as soon as you have an audience. -Rick Mulready   3 Things We Learned From This Episode Start using ads as soon as possible (20:07- 21:58)As soon as we have a social media presence and an audience, we should be leveraging ads. There’s no time like the present to start using ads if we have an audience.  Build an audience (22:41- 24:01)Those of us new to a platform may not have established audiences yet. The best way to build these audiences is by doing Facebook Lives, which we can later use as advertisements to build our following. Rethink advertising (20:07- 21:58)A lot of people are hesitant to use retargeted advertising, because there’s a common belief that this is an invasion of privacy. We have to shift our mindsets away from that - advertising isn’t going anywhere, so we may as well provide useful information to the right people.