Which Social Media Ads Are Actually Worth Paying For?

The general picture, before any platform

Denmark is a small market with real competition for the same audience, so wasted ad spend costs more here than it would in a bigger pool. Tight targeting matters more, not less — see the real numbers under Meta below for what that actually looks like in practice.

And social media here isn't just a youth thing anymore. Denmark's own statistics bureau tracks exactly how usage splits by age — the table below is that split for 2024, and it stays high well past 50.

Source: Danmarks Statistik, "It-anvendelse i befolkningen 2024" (Dec 2024) — figures cover any social media use (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn or X combined), not a per-platform breakdown.

For the per-platform split specifically, here's where Denmark stood in early 2025:

Source: DataReportal, "Digital 2025: Denmark" (3 March 2025) — figures come from the platforms' own advertising tools, so they measure potential ad reach rather than a strict user count.

Snapchat, LinkedIn and Pinterest are on that table but not broken out below, and it's worth saying why rather than just skipping them. Snapchat skews young globally, and probably here too — likely weak for driving purchases for a general local business. LinkedIn's high number is misleading if you read it as youth reach — it's a professional network, not a young one, so it matters for business-to-business services, not for a café or a shop. Pinterest is the one we wouldn't dismiss so fast: it skews toward people actively planning a purchase — home decor, DIY, weddings — so for a design or craft business it may be worth more than its user count suggests, even though we haven't tested it ourselves yet.

It's also worth separating two very different outcomes: an ad optimised for likes and follows tends to attract exactly that — likes and follows, often from people well outside your area, sometimes from accounts chasing giveaways rather than a product. An ad optimised for a specific action — a call, a visit, a booking — attracts a smaller audience, but a far more relevant one.

Don't buy fake followers

It's tempting when growth feels slow, but buying followers does real damage, not just wasted money:

• Zero real engagement — bought followers are bots or abandoned accounts. They never like, comment, or buy anything, and that drags your actual engagement rate down.
• Weaker organic reach — platform algorithms weigh engagement rate heavily. A big follower count with almost no interaction reads as "this content isn't good," and reach drops accordingly.
• Real risk to the account itself — Instagram, TikTok and X all actively scan for fake engagement and periodically purge bot networks. Get caught, and a business account can be restricted, throttled, or removed entirely for violating terms of service.

Don't buy fake followers (again 🙂).
"1,000 followers for 10 euro" isn't marketing — it's just fake, and it can cost more than the money. Buying followers breaks every platform's terms of service, and accounts caught doing it get flagged, throttled, or banned outright. Either way, a thousand bought followers won't buy a single coffee — they were never real customers to begin with.

One pattern holds across every platform below right now: short video (Reels, Shorts, TikToks) gets meaningfully better organic reach than a static photo post. If you only make one kind of content, that's the one.

One more trap that applies across platforms, not just one: boosting a post or buying ad credit directly inside a platform's iPhone app often routes the payment through Apple's own in-app purchase system, which takes its own cut before your money ever reaches the actual ad auction. Doing the same thing through the platform's proper desktop tool — Meta Business Suite, TikTok Ads Manager — is usually the cheaper path for the exact same result. See the real markup we found under TikTok below.

Meta — Facebook & Instagram

The most mature and accessible ad tools of the group. Genuinely useful local and interest-based targeting, a relatively low minimum spend to start testing, and a natural fit for anything visual — a café, a salon, a shop. If we were starting a local ad budget from zero, this is where it would start.

Here's what that actually costs in practice: we ran a real test on our own Vava Sport ad account, targeting Denmark specifically — Grenaa plus a 10-mile radius, using a lookalike audience based on our existing followers. A €100 total budget (€25/day over 4 days) gave an estimated 20,500–38,100 impressions and around 144 link clicks. Do the maths and that's roughly €0.70 per click — a real, calculable number, not a guess.

Meta Business Suite is the actual tool for this — not just the in-app "Boost post" button. That button is a simplified shortcut with limited targeting options; building the campaign properly in Business Suite (or the fuller Ads Manager) gives you real control over audience, budget, and placement, and shows what each campaign is actually costing you, in one place for both Facebook and Instagram.

One practical tip inside Business Suite: posts already tagged "High-quality creative" are Meta's own signal that the format is likely to perform well if boosted — usually vertical video, minimal text over the image, decent resolution. When deciding what to put money behind, that tag is a free hint worth following instead of guessing.

On the paid verified badge (Meta Verified): treat it mainly as a trust signal and some impersonation protection, not a guaranteed reach or follower boost. Worth knowing before paying for it expecting more customers to show up because of it.

TikTok

Reach for short video is genuinely strong right now — but there is a real, easy-to-miss cost trap. We set a €100 campaign budget directly in the TikTok app on iPhone, and the actual price at checkout was €169.49 — a markup of close to 70%, added the moment the payment routes through Apple's in-app purchase system instead of TikTok's own Ads Manager. Running the exact same campaign through Ads Manager on a desktop browser doesn't carry that markup — same reach, close to €70 cheaper on a €100 budget.

One genuinely useful feature: Spark Ads let you boost a video that's already live and already has real likes, comments, and shares — instead of starting a cold ad from zero engagement. A post that's already doing well organically is usually a stronger, cheaper thing to put money behind than a fresh one built purely as an ad.

The honest catch: it needs actual video, not a repurposed photo. If nobody on your team is willing to be on camera even briefly, this one gets harder to justify.

YouTube

Runs through Google Ads — the same system as our Google Ads piece covers — but specifically means video ads, which usually means a real production investment before the ad budget itself even starts. It suits building brand awareness over time better than an immediate "call us today" push. Different tool, different job.

One detail worth knowing: the common skippable in-stream format only charges you once someone actually watches around 30 seconds or interacts with the ad — not just for it loading before their video. Someone skipping after two seconds genuinely costs you nothing, which makes it a lower-risk way to test than it might sound.

X

X bills by CPM (cost per thousand impressions), and for all of Denmark with no other targeting, X's own tool estimated an addressable audience of 601,600–693,300 — smaller than the platform's total Danish user count, since this measures who an ad can actually reach, not everyone with an account.

Then we narrowed it the same way we did for the Meta test — down to Norddjurs, our own local area. X's response: "Your audience is too small." Under 1,000 estimated users, not enough to serve an ad at all. Compare that to Meta, where the equivalent local radius around Grenaa still returned a usable 20,500–38,100 impressions. For a small, genuinely local business, X's targeting simply isn't built as fine-grained as Meta's.

X Premium (the paid verified tier) includes real perks beyond the badge — fewer ads shown to the subscriber, some priority in replies, and built-in access to Grok, X's own AI chatbot from xAI. That last one is a genuinely distinctive perk none of the other platforms bundle into an ad subscription right now — but it's a reason to like X Premium as a subscriber, not necessarily a reason to advertise there as a business. Those are two different questions, and for a hyper-local ad budget, the audience test above already answers the second one.

Threads

Doesn't really have a mature paid-ads option yet. Worth watching as it develops, not worth budgeting for right now.

One honest note on all of this

Platforms change these features, prices, and minimums constantly — treat everything above as a snapshot of right now, not a permanent ranking. Always check current costs directly on the platform before committing a real budget.