Facebook Advertising Guide for Beginners

Adam Brown 10 years ago

One of the simplest yet most effective things I’ve learnt about Facebook advertising - and this also applies to other platforms such as Twitter and Reddit - is that marketing is not about how I can influence you, marketing is about how I can make you influence other people.

Facebook advertising can be used for a variety of different things. Lead generation, brand awareness and direct sales can all be driven from Facebook’s simple advertising platform. But it’s not just about driving direct sales. Facebook can be used as a funnel.

If you are looking at it from a direct sales/conversion perspective, you will see spend and conversion but it’s not exclusively about this. You need to be looking at the broader and bigger picture. Facebook, however much it is changing, is still a brilliant platform for sharing and people do want to share. Instead of looking at it in a conversion perspective look at Facebook advertising as a platform to advertise but also to gain advertising for free.

If you target that one person they will say yes, no, or maybe, but if you show that person something they are willing to share, it then becomes a personal recommendation which is so much stronger than a single random advert they have just seen in their newsfeed.

Community Management

Looking after Facebook pages can be a mammoth task but in the long run can really pay off. As you will be reading on many a blog, produce good content and the rest will fall into place. The same applies here. If you are producing content that your audience wants to see, your engagement and likes will continue to rise.

So how does this effect advertising? When you are running adverts, this can give you some leverage and also allows you to change who you are targeting and in what way.

Competitions might sound old-fashioned, but they remain as popular a mechanic as ever. They are a great way to create a unique spin on the normal advertising you see on Facebook, and when you target the right people it can work really well for gaining likes as well as increased engagement rate.

A tip here is to offer a prize or prizes which you know will excite your community and get them ‘talking’ and sharing – not a cheap, generic-looking offer which audiences are constantly being bombarded with and can find anywhere.

Paid advertising on Google allows you to target one person in one stream but with Facebook, when you create and run a campaign, your ad will firstly show to your target audience. That’s your first hit. However, if anyone in that audience has interacted, it will show to their friend, which is a secondary hit and therefore acting as free advertising! What are the equivalent chances of someone sharing a good advertisement they might have seen on Google the other day? Virtually zero.

Segment your audience for personalised content

One risk with Facebook is getting too complacent with your advertising. This is true within most other platforms as well but it all comes down to testing again. Adverts always need to be tested over and over again.

Getting complacent with an advert can also mean that the costs continue to rise, after a while your targeting group gets smaller and smaller as you continue to target the same people. The frequency the advert is shown to them increases and if they haven’t liked it the first time they have seen it, it’s unlikely they will the second time.

It’s not all about your advertising strategy. You have to have something that makes your business or website different: for example, Zappo’s USP is based upon amazing customer service. If you have a USP it can greatly increase every aspect of your Facebook advertising apart from the cost. If you start an e-commerce store selling clothes that every other store sells, why would someone click that ad or like your page?

If you sell clothes everyone sells BUT you have an incredible story about how you’re different to your competitors – such as TOMs, which donates free shoes to children in poverty with every pair of adult shoes purchased from them - you’ve got an amazing groundwork to begin your advertising.

Your ads have three parts

The Audience
So who exactly do you want to target? Of course, you should be building your website/business strategy as a whole around this, not just your Facebook advertising campaign.

The Story
What’s the story you are going to tell through either your page or your advert? Stories that resonate with your target audience, as you’ve heard before, sell.

A Reason to Share
This is mainly related to promoted content but also needs to be thought about when aiming for likes. If your advert is good enough they will continue to the page and then like or share content. With promoted content, ask this: is it useful to others? Will they share it with their friends or even recommend your page?

Content and paid budget

When it comes to paying to promote certain content there is one big factor with most paid content promotion on Facebook: TIME. If you create two posts a day on your Facebook page you will see the normal rate of engagement you have, when one suddenly gets a lot more than the average this is the time to promote it. This can be difficult if you are running pages and paid content on behalf of a client but if you can quickly get in touch and move budget around this can really improve what you get for your money.

Content that is interesting obviously obtains more engagement. It may sound like a really simple point but one that many forget. If you promote a product day in day out on your Facebook page the audience will grow tired of the repeated cycle and aren’t going to engage with the post. If you post content that is timely and engages the audience, overall engagement will increase and in turn gives you great content to promote.

I’ve said this before but an advert on Facebook is not just about selling or getting likes, it’s about getting that personal recommendation from a friend.
If one of your friends already likes the page that means you are more likely to like it also - unless you don’t like that friend, of course!

Dark posts/hidden posts

Dark posts can be created via power editor, which you should be using more and more. Facebook seems to be favouring power editor users by implementing changes to this area with minimal change happening in the basic ads manager. Power editor, once you learn how to use it, can really speed up advert creation.

One of the massive advantages of hidden posts or dark posts is that you don’t have to post them to your page, in turn not spamming the page, if you want to run a variety of different promoted posts. This also means that you can turn posts on and off. For example, what if you have shops all around the country and are running an offer but the store in London has sold out? You can then turn the advert for London off, in turn reducing the negative impact that could be seen from promoting an offer that cannot be claimed.

How to approach building Facebook ads

1. Image – The image has to grab the user’s attention. This could be with a variety of different things such as:

- Colours
- Different Shapes
- White Space
- Emotion

2. Title – Within a title there should be something interesting to the user. After grabbing their attention with the image, you need to keep them reading the text so ensuring the title is interesting is a must.

3. Text – This area is mainly used for a call to action, for example ‘like our page’, ‘start your trial’ or ‘try us today’.

There is never a definitive way to write and present adverts as it will be different for your target audience, so this is where experience, as well as testing, comes into play. Don’t settle for the price you are at now, keep testing until you get lower.

How to Choose Targeting

Start with what you know works

The first step is to start with what you know works. If you have run ads in the past for a similar campaign, and know this works, it’s a good place to start.

Test smaller targeting

The next step with your targeting is to test a smaller area; for example, splitting the ad into multiple campaigns and also splitting the interests. This allows you to get a better understanding of what each area/interest being targeted costs.

Custom audiences are brilliant for conversions using emails

Custom audiences can work wonders for increasing conversions, and in turn lowering costs. Email lists can achieve this, as can a pixel placed on the site.  Placing a tracking pixel on the site can greatly improve how you target people. The pixel can be set up on different areas of the site, which means you can set rules for each audience such as users who have visited the cart or visitors who only visited the home page. This can take some time but once set up the custom audiences can be used over and over again via power editor.

Testing

When testing, one of the first points I would raise is to not waste the segment. For example, you set up an advert, targeting a huge audience and the advert performs poorly. People have now seen the advert and decided not to click and if you included a brand name or something you want to keep throughout, you have now wasted that audience.

The first test you do should be to a small audience. This allows you to test your ad copy (image, title and body). I would suggest setting up multiple campaigns for your advert as Facebook chooses one out of the campaign and runs with that, not always the best one. After these are set up, you cannot wait an hour and see what happens as it really does take some time and a bit of budget to test properly.

After you have found a few different advert campaigns that work well it’s time to start increasing the targeting size to gain even more data. Throughout these testing phases you need to keep track of each advert you have created. For example, what you changed, what was the decrease/increase in CPA.

Testing an advert to make sure you get the right one as well as the right targeting is not a quick or simple process. It can be costly. The main thing to remember is that as you continue to use Facebook advertising you will gain insight into what works and what doesn’t for your brand or website, which in turn will reduce costs on other campaigns.

Other methods to gain reach on Facebook

Facebook’s promised release of Hashtags has started to rollout this week.  This opens up a whole new front for Facebook in terms of data collection, and will change the way users use the platform.

On July 1st 2009 Twitter began to hyperlink all hashtags, thus validating the content grouping mechanism devised by its core users, and now Facebook is following suit.  Some Facebook users have been using hashtags in content for some time of course, particularly when using third party Twitter/Facebook cross-posting software, but now Facebook is taking Twitter’s lead and further advancing the platform.

First, let’s have a quick look at how Facebook’s hashtags work in practice.  At present, on a personal account, adding a hashtag to a status update is simple and looks like this:

Facebook-2

However, even if you don’t see the blue shading of the hashtag come up as you type, your hashtags will be clickable by users who currently have the functionality.  Although, note, if it doesn’t come up in blue for you as you type then you won’t be able to see hashtags as hyperlinked as of yet until the rollout reaches your profile.

Once a hashtag is in a post (for a user with the functionality) the update will look as per the below with the hashtag in hyperlinked text:

Facebook-1

Upon clicking the hyperlinked hashtag the following overlay appears showing the activity around the hashtag:

Facebook

From this area the functionality is present to say something about this hashtag or scroll through posts from users with no connection to yourself who have used this hashtag, in a Twitter esque way (presumably providing they’ve set their post to “public”).

Right now, two things that seem to be missing (in my version of the rollout at least) are:

  1. Mobile functionality: I’m unable to see a hashtag as hyperlinked on the Facebook mobile app or mobile site
  2. Search function: I can’t currently search by hashtag anywhere (although NOTE I still do not have Graph Search which is most likely why

We've gone into a bit more detail on the why element over at MarketingLand (to be published soon), but here's a quick summary to make sure you know everything you need to.

From Facebook's perspective this completes their data set.  Right now, Facebook know an awful lot about who we are and what we like, but in reality they are a little fuzzy on what we talk about.  Not anymore.  Hashtags give Facebook a rich new data set as users voluntarily flag up to Facebook the key meaning of their content.  Hashtags reveal topic, sentiment, and opinions about a wide variety of issues.  This allows Facebook to know more, and therefore will allow them to open up better targeting options for their advertising product.

Soon, page owners will be able to target their Facebook adverts based on hashtags used by users.  This will allow advertisers to target more active fans who are actively discussing something, rather than just belonging to a grouping or having liked a certain page at some point in the past.  This will in theory improve conversion rates from click to like (providing the advert and page is relevant) and should give savvy marketers a way to further reduce the cost of fan acquisition.

From a content marketing perspective, things are going to get even more interesting on Facebook.  At present if you want your Facebook content to have a high reach (particularly outside of your page's extended network) you need to either come up with a highly viral post or amplify your content in the Facebook newsfeed based on user like profiles.  Now, the opportunity has been created to push your posts outside of your network by using hashtags, particularly when they are trending.  Below is an example of this for a competition post using the #win tag:

Urban Eat-1

Going forward, page owners need to be looking out for trending hashtags that they can take advantage of, and amend their content plans to fit the trends where they can.  This will ensure that maximum reach is achieved.  In much the same way as Twitter this will be hit and miss - hashtag results are shown chronologically and dependent upon pictures and screen size, only a few show above the fold of the hashtag overlay box.  This means that you need your content to go out at the right time as a hashtag grows in popularity to get maximum exposure.

As always, the key to success is in the measurement.  Analyse the results of your posts with hashtags, split test, and base your future content on your learnings.  Hashtag data (impressions, clicks, reach, engagement) is not yet available in Facebook insights, but hopefully won't be far away.  For now you'll need to try to test yourself by split testing and checking reach and impression figures (which should include reach from hashtag searches/clicks).

Key Takeaways

    1. Facebook hashtags are here and ready to be used.  Check if you can use them (#hashtag will appear in blue shading as you type in your status and hashtags will be clickable on Facebook) and get started!  Even if you can't click hashtags yet on Facebook, start using them in your content as others can!
    2. This is going to create new opportunities for expanding your reach on Facebook.  Monitor the trends, jump on them, and create relevant content around hashtags to increase your reach
    3. Get ready for even better Facebook ad targeting.  Facebook's targeting is already incredible, but with the inclusion of this data source is about to get even better when new targeting functions are released

Does organic Facebook activity still work?

Algorithms change all the time, and a few years back Facebook prioritised conversations and engagement with friends to boost certain posts on the newsfeed. If your posts aren't creating discussion in the comments, there was less chance of gaining any traction organically. Here is some advice to get your content seen organically - there are still ways to make sure you secure that all too important reach.

Good quality content

The question, then is: 'What is good quality content?' When announcing the algorithmic change Facebook said people want to see more high quality articles with links to external media sites. Facebook are taking “newsfeed” back to a more literal meaning of the word.

So, I listened to Zuckerberg’s merry men and started testing these “good quality articles”.  However hardly any of them broke the fabled 3% reach barrier.

This left me with one more thought; never mind what Facebook wants to see, what does your audience want to see? By referring back to original content plans and our own social data insight (which we explain more about here and also here), we soon had a pretty good idea of what generated engagement and what didn’t on our page. It can also be a great idea to track engagement across key competitor pages. We have our own tool to do that but you can buy 'off the shelf' solutions from the likes of Social Bakers to do this and it will help you understand what content is getting more traction across a broader data landscape.

Low and behold, organic reach was up and the conclusion is actually head-smackingly obvious and good news for real content creators:. Facebook want to see more posts that people actually care about. They want people to think about what and why they’re posting - not just because you’ve seen something similar with 5,000 likes elsewhere.

Be resourceful

If you’re managing a page on Facebook for a brand with a particular area of expertise you should share your knowledge. Take advantage of what the company knows best and produce resources such as ebooks or a “top tips” blog post. Your fan base will be grateful for the help and will reward you with engagement.

Now obviously, particularly if your brand is relatively small, you wont be able to churn out these resources everyday so try adding this as a weekly or bi-weekly feature.

A picture (or link) is worth a thousand words

Facebook have just announced that users weren’t as engaged with the service when shown more text updates from Pages. So they are now telling Page owners that if they want their posts to appear in newsfeeds, they ought to feature photos or links.

Even since the algorithm change, pictures are so much more valuable than links. We are not saying to completely discount links as you can have some success. But if you want to consistently achieve good reach, as well as good engagement, images are still the way forward.

Now here’s a trick. If you have a really good quality link but are sceptical as to how well it will do on it’s own, you should structure your post to include a link whilst still posting a photo. This way you will still have a link but also high quality content that will increase engagement. This is a good shortcut to post high quality articles as well as meeting the needs of your audience.

Timing is key

Now this one is pretty obvious but it is still should be at the forefront of your social content strategy. If only a third of your audience is active at the time you’re posting, you’ve already hindered your chance of maximum reach.

If you don’t know when the peak times that your fan base is online – find out. You can easily extract this information from Facebook via the insights section of your page.  This will give you a weekly average of when your fans are active on Facebook.

However, you can break this data down so you can see when your fans are most active each day. This can really help when devising content strategies or deciding when to schedule your posts.

By ticking these boxes and familiarising yourself with this insight you will have a much better chance of increasing reach, and engagement, all down to the fact there is more people online to see it.

Keep them guessing

It is important not to rest on your laurels if you’ve found a nice mix on content that seems to getting good engagement and reach across the board. Predictable content will eventually turn your page stale and reach will reflect that.

To avoid this try not to get too specific in your strategic plan. Give yourself enough room to work in different types of content that still fall into your defined theme so that you can keep on top of your content sourcing.

Try and test rather than tired and tested!

When running Facebook ads it is important to test out different tactics to make sure you are getting the best value. You should apply this method to organic posting, as well, because this will give you confidence when sourcing and posting content.

Knowing what types of content work on your page and what doesn’t is half the battle. Do this test at least bi-monthly, or whenever you have had a significant influx of new likes, because what worked before may not necessarily be successful with your new fan base.

Know your enemy

This one doesn’t directly affect your reach but will help your posting strategy. It is always a good idea to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. However, defining social competitors is slightly different to defining competitors from a more traditional area of marketing.

Firstly, you will want to highlight your pages direct competitors. These will be pages or business that offer the same service as you – the traditional competitors. But also it will be beneficial to include pages that share similar content to you because you will be able to see the effect of the slight differences in your strategies.

To compare your engagement rates with your competitors you will need to know your own. You can do this easily by visiting Facebook Insights. It is trickier to find out your competitors engagement rates. To do this you will need to use a paid analytics tool. Here is a handy guide comparing different tools.

Once you have these figures you will have a clear understanding of how your page measures up against your competitors. Depending on the outcome will determine whether you should stick to your current plan or reevaluate your strategy. Not directly linked to reach – but always handy to know.

You will make the difference

This is perhaps our biggest tip to increase organic reach is by engaging with your engagement. We all know that social media has been so successful for brands because it can provide two-way conversations that traditional marketing outlets can’t – But how many of you have been as conversational as you could be?

If you actively reply to as many comments on my posts as possible reach will increase. This is because, more often than not, a conversation will ensue between the people you have replied to. If you conduct this conversation in a friendly manner it will demonstrate good customer service and will encourage others to do the same. Also, don’t over complicate your posts. Don’t go reaching for the thesaurus – Make sure you audience will actually understand what it is you’re saying.

By having more people actively engage with your posts it will improve the chances of your posts being seen by others, as Facebook will recognise this post as particularly engaging. Facebook want to see people actively engage, all these changes are to ensure that it remains a community rather than a suppository.

Tips to get organic Facebook reach

So here’s our top ten tactics to improve reach:

      1. Source good quality content
      2. Know what your audience wants to see
      3. Share valuable resources
      4. Use photos
      5. Know you optimum posting times
      6. Avoid being predictable
      7. Test different types and topics of content
      8. Know your enemy
      9. Engage with your engagement
      10.  Be friendly!

By following these suggestions, you will be able to resurrect your organic reach and start to see an improvement to engagement rates. However,  the main lesson that Facebook page managers need to take away from this is that you need to put a lot more thought into what you are doing. The more time, effort and commitment you put in will determine whether your page has an organic future.

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