Posting Overly Promotional Facebook Posts Kills Reach

Posting Overly Promotional Facebook Posts Kills Reach

For some time now, Facebook has been pushing brands to be less companies using the platform as advertising, and more entities socializing with people on the platform. Everything they’ve done to change pages, from moving tabs to reducing organic reach, is a push in that direction. They’re not opposed to using their site for advertising – far from it, in fact. They just want you to use the appropriate channels, i.e. Facebook Ads.

The most cynical of us tend to believe this is a ploy by Facebook to increase their revenue, through pushing people to pay for ads to get what they once got organically. I’m not quite that cynical, but I do believe that Facebook knows full well that the moves they make will affect their profits. They aren’t motivated solely by those profits, however.

User Experience

See, Facebook has to have the user experience in mind. If they let their platform decay into a spiral of advertising, with companies clamoring to out-shout each other for your attention, you would leave. It’s that simple; when the user experience disintegrates, so too does a website’s user-base. It would take some time for everyone to abandon the site, but all it would take is one good ad-free replacement and Facebook would die a gruesome, ignoble death.

Facebook needs to consider the user experience, then, and not just their bottom line. To that end, they constantly solicit and listen to feedback from users. Feedback comes through their support forums and comments channels, conversations on their business blogs, and analysis of what users are reporting as spam and hiding in terms of posts in their feed.

It’s well known that Facebook curates the news feed for people. It’s obvious why, too; the average user would see somewhere around 1,500 posts per day if it was completely unfiltered. With EdgeRank in play and the curation engine in full force, that number is cut to closer to 300. A drastic difference.

In order to display the most important stories, Facebook filters out what you don’t want to see. It does this primarily by analyzing what you interact with from day to day. When you comment on a post made by a friend, you’re more likely to see more posts by that friend in the coming days. Heck, you even see more from a friend when you visit their profile, even if you don’t do anything there.

The same goes for brands; when you interact with a brand, you then see more posts from that brand more often. If time passes and you don’t interact with that brand, you see less and less of their content. Eventually, Facebook stops showing you posts from that brand entirely. There are a few wildcards to keep it from being degenerate, but that’s the way it works, more or less.

Recently, Facebook made an announcement that made a lot of businesses mad. That announcement was that they listened to user feedback and have determined that users really don’t want to see advertisements in their news feed.

This seems like a “no duh” moment to some of us, but to others it’s devastating news. Before you go crying apocalypse, however, take a look into the deeper context of the statement.

Facebook Reducing Ads in Newsfeeds

The first thing you need to know is that it’s always been obvious and it’s always been the case that users don’t like reading commercials in their news feed. It’s true on Facebook, it’s true on Twitter, it’s true on Pinterest, it’s true on Ello, it’s true everywhere. Heck, it’s the same reason a lot of web forums ban advertising except through banner ads. Users don’t want to see it.

The second thing to know is that it’s not a blanket ban on all promotional content. For one thing, promoted posts and news feed ads are still perfectly okay. You’re no more limited in their content than you have been since they were first created. You can be as promotional as you want, as long as you’re paying for it.

There’s that cynicism again.

The third thing to know is that Facebook’s definition of promotional content is probably a lot more narrow than most businesses are afraid of. As Jon Loomer, perhaps the Internet’s foremost authority on Facebook advertising, says in that previous link, promotional content is only:

• Content that has no purpose beyond getting people to buy a product or install an app.


• Content that pushes people to enter contests or sweepstakes without any other valuable context.


• Content that has copy more or less identical to ads.

So, you know, don’t copy and paste your ad text into your organic posts and expect it to fly, right? It’s really that simple. Facebook isn’t telling brands they can’t act like brands, that would be suicide from another perspective. After all, advertising dollars are a good chunk of what keeps Facebook afloat.

The thing you need to take away from all of this is that you need to be valuable to your users. And no, “they can buy my cool product!” isn’t valuable. That’s valuable to you, but not necessarily to your users.

When I say valuable, what I mean is something the user gets out of your posts that they don’t have to pay for. It might be an informational blog post. It might be telling them about a new TV show they might want to watch. It might be sharing a piece of industry news. It might be a product announcement, to build awareness and not preorders. It might be customer service in public form.

Whatever the case, you do need to avoid being purely promotional. It’s no longer just a recommendation to get more engagement out of your posts; it’s a necessity. Facebook is actively penalizing the posts it deems promotional, and it’s hurting the brands that make those posts.

View your customers as people, not as walking ATMs. Win their hearts and minds, and they will gladly open their wallets to you. Just don’t go for their wallets; they’ll view you as the pickpocket you’re trying to be.

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Is it Possible to Track Where Your Likes Came From?

Is it Possible to Track Where Your Likes Came From?

Simple question, simple answer.

1. Click on the Insights button at the top of your page. You had to know that if there was a way to do this, it’d be in Insights, right?


2. Click the “Likes” section. Seems fairly obvious in retrospect.


3. Scroll down until you find the “Where Your Page Likes Came From” section.

If your page has under 30 users, you won’t be able to access the Insights panel. Of course, at that point you don’t have much use for insights; the statistical sample size is too small, the data you get wouldn’t be meaningful.

There’s actually a lot of cool data you can get from the Likes section of your Insights panel. Let’s do an overview.

Like Insights

First of all, you have your top navigation bar. This allows you to click between your general overview, the Likes section, a section about the reach of your posts, data about the people talking about your page, and your check-ins.

Within the Likes section, you have a date selector, so you can choose to look up data for any specific date range you’re curious about. This can be useful to see how your demographics have changed over time, as well as giving you information about a traffic spike. You don’t want to check a surge in likes only to find all of the users coming from Vietnam, eh?

Over in the upper right corner, you have two buttons. One is obvious; the export data button allows you to export your data. You can choose to get it in XLS or CSV format for use in other programs. You can also export it for specific date ranges, or at a page level or individual post level.

Next to that button is the general settings button, that isn’t super useful in Insights. It allows you to take a tour of the page if you don’t know what’s what, as well as giving you a quick link to the Help Center. You can also use this to send feedback to Facebook about their page, if you have something to say.

In the actual meat of the data, you have a big fancy graph. It has age-segmented columns situated around a center line, rising above and falling below that center line. On one side, above, is females; below is males. This is the easiest way for Facebook to present this data, though their slew of gender options makes this a lot harder to display accurately.

Below that data, you have three columns of numerical data. You can see your fans divided by country of origin. If you’ve been advertising organically and growing naturally, you’ll have a large portion of users in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and possibly Australia. If you’ve been hit by clickfarms or you’ve bought likes from shady sellers, you’ll probably see countries like India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey and Pakistan in the list near the top. If any of these countries has taken the number one position, you may have a problem on your hands.

Next to the country data is the city data, which operates in much the same way. Next to that is language spoken by your users – or at least, language set on Facebook. A user who uses English Facebook but posts in Spanish will still count as English. Note that this also differentiates between English (US) and English (UK), as well as French and French Canadian, and other language divides.

Scroll down and you see the “where your likes came from” section. This has a graph on the left, which you can check to see both new likes and unlikes. Next to that is a column of numerical data with the number of likes and the source of those likes. This is regulated by the date range all the way at the top, so make sure to set the date for the time you want to check.

What sort of like data does Facebook save for this? It’s surprisingly granular. You have large categories like “mobile” which include everyone who liked your page using a mobile device. This will probably be the highest number, simply due to how many people use Facebook for mobile.

You also have categories like Timeline, Ads and API. Timeline and Ads are self-explanatory, and API just means anyone who liked your page from a third party app.

Then you have more granular sources, like Search, Ticker, and Wizard. These, respectively, show people who liked your page from the search function, people who liked y our page from a story they saw in the ticker, and people who liked your page based on new user suggestions.

This isn’t even a complete list. You can find a more complete list here, but even that isn’t a fully complete list.

Why might you want to see all this information?

Well, for one thing, it’s a neat curiosity. As I mentioned, the largest category is probably going to be mobile, just because it’s such a larger and more over-arching category than many of the others. Beneath it, though, it’s more of a no-man’s-land of any category that comes up. You might be surprised at where some of your likes come from. Who would have thought that the new user recommendation was as effective as it is, eh?

You can also use this as a measurement of how effective certain actions you take may be. For example, say you want to implement a Facebook Like Box on your website. You do so, and you’re curious how well it works. Check this bit of Insights to see how many people like through the “external-connect” source, which measures that sort of plugin.

Consider another example; running an ad campaign for page likes. This is a specific like source in Insights, so if your campaign is reasonably successful, you’ll be able to see it in this section. You’ll also be able to see how many of those people go back and unlike your page shortly after, which is a sign that something isn’t appealing to those users.

Really, it call just comes down to your creativity and how many uses you can find for the esoteric and highly granular data Facebook provides.

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Why Does My Facebook Ad Say Active But It’s Not Working?

Why Does My Facebook Ad Say Active But It’s Not Working?

If you don’t know the ins and outs of the system, operating Facebook ads is a labyrinthine task. There are so many options and so many configurations that there are almost infinite possible failure points.

One of the most frustrating failures is not Facebook rejecting your ad. It’s not running your ad and getting untargeted, useless followers. It’s not even running an ad and seeing it underperform. The absolute worst is when you set an ad, everything looks fine, and it says “delivering” in the status for the ad. You check back a day or two later, only to find 0 views and 0 clicks. Your ad claims its delivering, but it’s clearly not. So what happened?

The Off Switch

An individual ad might say it’s delivering, but that’s only the status message for when your ad is turned on. Try clicking up to the ad set level and checking there. Is the ad set to run there as well? If yes, click up to the campaign level. There’s another off switch there, so if your campaign is turned off but your ads are turned on, they still read as on.

The reason for the triple layer off switch is to save settings when you need to adjust your ads on the fly. Say you have two campaigns, one that’s always running and one that’s time-sensitive for a holiday. Inside the holiday campaign, you have three ad sets, each with four ads inside them. That’s a total of 12 ads to be testing and running when the campaign is on.

As you run your holiday campaign, you adjust which ads run. You turn a few on, a few off, maybe disabling one ad set entirely. Then the holiday arrives and passes, your deals end, and you want to stop the ads.

To stop the ads, you have three options. You can go down and manually turn off all twelve ads. This works, but what happens if you want to restore your campaign later? You’d have to figure out which ads were turned off and which were running, which wastes time.

You can also delete the ads, but that’s not a great solution either. If you delete your ads, you can’t turn them back on later. They’re gone, they can’t be recovered, you just have to make them again if you change your mind. Facebook has a very high limit on saved ads, so it’s perfectly reasonable to have old ads disabled rather than deleted.

The best solution is to just turn off the campaign. That way, if you want to pick up where you left off, all you have to do is click one button. Unfortunately, that leads to cases where at the ad level, and even the ad set level, it looks like your ads are live. Only when you check campaign status do you notice they have been disabled.

The Bid Wars

Facebook ads are PPC. You want clicks, you pay for them. The more you pay, the more clicks you’ll get.

This is, of course, determined by a wide range of factors. The targeting you use – from demographic to interest to keyword – affects the cost of a given click. There’s a huge amount of writing available about the search for lower costs per click.

Searching for a lower cost per click is just a way of getting more clicks for the same budget. Very few marketers will lower their cost per click and then cut their advertising budget by that amount. Instead, they’ll take the money and reinvest in more clicks or another campaign.

When you set up Facebook ads, you set a maximum bid. This is a hard cap on the amount of money Facebook will spend on ads in a given period. You might have $1 CPC or $0.01 CPC, it won’t matter; once you spend up to your limit, Facebook cuts it off. There’s no judgment or analytics attached to determine whether cutting off is in your best interests.

This leads to a situation where you put in a maximum bid that’s fairly low. You might do this because you’ve managed a very low CPC, or you might do it because you’re running the ads on a limited basis and want to test how well they work before investing more. Either way, it’s a hard limit.

What happens, then, if Facebook can’t find anyone within your targeting that fits your budget? Your ad will say it’s delivering, but no one will see it.

One reason this happens is because of OCPM. This is Facebook’s optimized pay scheme, which dynamically determines which people are the best to see an ad, based on the objective of that ad. You might have one set of audience targeting factors, but within that audience, Facebook has ranked the users. Some users will be more likely to click an app, while others are more likely to like a page.

You optimize based on an objective, and Facebook will spend your advertising budget where it makes the most sense. Unfortunately, with a sufficiently low budget and a sufficiently limited target audience, you run into situations where the best users are the users that cost the most to reach. Facebook essentially gets caught in a failure loop; it doesn’t have enough budget to spend to reach the people you want to reach.

You can fix this by reverting to a regular bid scheme, or you can just increase your bid.

Narrow Targeting

Facebook has over a billion monthly active users, so it should be easy to get an audience no matter what your audience targeting may be, right? Well, that’s not really true. Sufficiently narrow targeting can leave your effective audience at zero. For example, what if you limit your targeting to Salt Lake City, you limit it to only Japanese speaking users, who are female, aged 60+, with two children, and who like The Simpsons. This is entirely possible within Facebook’s audience targeting, and it’s also entirely possible that there are people who fit that description.

The problems here are two-fold. First, what if those users don’t sign on? If the users aren’t there to be shown advertising, your ads won’t run. It’s also possible that those users don’t exist, and your targeting is too narrow. You will have to broaden it in order to reach anyone.

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Can You Target People Who Have Liked a Specific Fan Page?

Can You Target People Who Have Liked a Specific Fan Page?

This is an interesting question. If you’re not sure why you might use such a feature, let me explain a scenario.

Let’s say you have one strong competitor. You’re roughly neck and neck with them in terms of audience, traffic, and revenue. You want to pull ahead in any way you can, and you’re investigating Facebook ads.

Now imagine you could show an advertisement specifically to the followers of your competitor. You could target them directly with the ad copy. “Bob’s Blue Widgets? Who Needs ‘Em? Shop at Rosie’s Red Widgets Today!”

The idea of being able to target customers of your competition is enticing. It’d be like if a mom and pop grocery store was able to set up shop in front of Wal-Mart, to show how much better their hand-crafted groceries were.

Thankfully, you can do exactly that. It’s one of the targeting options in Facebook, called Connections.

Using Connections

Connections targeting is a type of targeting in Facebook ads designed to allow you to target followers, or the followers of a different page. For example, you might set up an event page for a store event. By using your original page as targeting for ads for your event, you can target specifically the people who already follow you. This adds another avenue of messaging to the news feed to help reach more people.

Connections, however, is not limited to just your pages. You can put the name of any Page whatsoever in the connections section. You can even target the connections following a given person’s personal account, though it won’t do you much good unless that person is an influencer and has thousands or millions of fans.

There’s one caveat you should know; when you put in more than one business in the connections section, it’s like creating a Venn diagram. You will only target the people who are connected to both pages. For example, if you put in your page and your competitor’s page, your ad would only be displayed to the Bats of the world.

Ideally, you will only use the competitor connection for these sorts of ads. Adding additional connections makes your target audience too small to be useful. You can, however, add other targeting factors. For example, adding in age ranges, gender targeting and interest targeting helps you get specifically the people least likely to be loyal to your competitor’s brand.

Competitor targeting is also useful for when your competitor is much larger. Take the mom and pop vs. Wal-Mart example above. The mom and pop store wouldn’t necessarily want to target everyone who follows Wal-Mart; that audience is far too large. They would want to add in geographical targeting, to hit just those people who shop at their local Wal-Mart.

Quirks of Competitive Targeting

Here’s an interesting thought; who are you getting when you run ads targeting your competitors? Obviously, you’re only getting people who were engaged with their brand enough to like their page. On the other hand, the average page post only reaches 6-10% of the audience of a given page. Fewer bother to engage with posts.

Would you rather target the people who are engaging with your competitors, or would you rather not?

On one hand, you have the people who engage with your competition. These people are active on social media and like the brand, but that doesn’t mean their the most loyal people. They might just not be aware of any alternative. Plus, there’s such a thing as negative engagement; people who count as engaged simply because they leave negative feedback on the page’s posts. Those people might be great to have following your brand.

On the other hand, if those people are loyal, they’re not going to do anything but scoff at your ads. They’re loyal to your competitors, and you don’t have the leverage to dislodge them.

Getting your ads in front of the people who aren’t engaged, who aren’t loyal, might be a better option. Then again, those people might be just as disengaged and just as disloyal with you. You never know whether you’ll be able to impress them or not.

You can use tools to analyze the audience your competitors have, but you can’t really use that information in ads targeting. You can’t tell Facebook to target specifically the most engaged people or the least loyal people. You can do demographics, but those are likely to match your own demographics anyways.

Tailored Content

Don’t forget that when you’re trying to poach competitor fans, you need to make yourself look more attractive. You need to showcase the fact that you sell the same things your competitors do, but that you have a better dead. You have better support. You’re better in some way.

In order to do this, you need to carefully shift your content in such a way that it emphasizes your benefits over those of your competitors. It’s like paper towel commercials, showing the generic brand barely able to clean up a spill, while your brand mops it up with a gold star on top.

This is easier if you’re not going specifically for page likes. The page likes objective sends users to your page, where they’re given the chance to like you and follow your updates. This is fine, but it doesn’t give you the tailored presence you need. Instead, you should go for website clicks or conversions. Send users to your website on a landing page that further emphasizes the difference between you and your competitors.

From there, it’s just a matter of conversion optimization and incentives to convert. Let them do the work for you, and you can poach fans with impunity. Just don’t be too obvious about it, lest your competitors pull the same thing on you.

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How to Grant Others Access to a Facebook Page

How to Grant Others Access to a Facebook Page

This is a pretty open-ended topic, so I’m going to talk about various forms of access you can give to different people on a Facebook page. Hopefully, one of them will answer the questions you may have. If there’s an access question you have that I haven’t covered, leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

Making a Page Visible

When you first create a Facebook page, it’s by default hidden and unpublished. This is to prevent users from trying to access it before you’ve filled out information and made your first posts. It also helps keep users from posting on a feed before you’ve locked it down, or exploiting other loopholes in security before you set them.

Once you have finished setting up your page, you want to make it visible so that users can access it. In order to do so, all you need to do is click the “publish page” link at the top in the banner. If this banner doesn’t appear, you can click over to Settings. Under General, at the top, is Page Visibility. Simply click edit on this and make sure “unpublish page” is unchecked.

Pay attention to this settings menu; it will be useful for other steps as well.

Granting a User Page Special Permissions

There are eight roles a user can have when interacting with a page.

• Banned. Banned users cannot view or interact with the page at all.


• Not Following. The default state, users don’t who don’t follow or interact with your page have no special permissions.


• Following. When a user follows you they gain extra permissions, typically the ability to check in or post to your page, if allowed.

The remaining five roles are administrative roles you can assign to a social media team.

• Analyst. These users can see your Insights and can see who in the administration posted from the page account.


• Advertiser. These users have the same permissions as analysts, but can also create and manage advertising.


• Moderators. These users have the same permissions as advertisers, but can also remove and ban people, respond to posts, delete posts, and send messages as the page.


• Editors. These users have the same permissions as moderators, but can also create and delete posts as the page, and can edit the page itself, including adding apps.


• Administrators. These users have the same permissions as editors, but can also manage page roles and settings. By default, only the page owner is a moderator, though you can set additional moderators.

To set a page role, a user must either be connected to you as a personal user, or you have to know their email address. In the page settings menu, click the page roles section. Type in the person’s name or their email address. There will be a role drop-down, where you select one of the five administrative roles. Click to save the changes once you have selected the role.

Choosing Administrators for Facebook Groups

A group isn’t quite a page, but admins there might want to add additional admins to help manage the group. Unlike pages, there are no special roles; just user or admin. To add someone as an admin, find them in the user list. Click the gear beneath their name and choose “make admin.” Admins can remove other admins, including the group owner, to be cautious.

Allowing Users to Check In

If you want to allow users to check in to your page, you need to have a physical location. If you don’t have a physical location, you are unfortunately out of luck.

To allow check-ins, you need to put your physical address into the system. With that address saved, Facebook will give you the option of displaying a map, as well as star reviews and check-ins. Enable this option. There is no way to remove reviews while allowing check-ins, or vice versa.

Allowing Users to Post to Walls

Another user access consideration is whether or not you want users to be able to post to your page news feed. Most businesses turn this off, because they want their feed to be a stream of their own messaging. By disabling this option, pages don’t have to worry about spam or harassment on their walls.

If you would rather allow your Facebook page news feed to operate as a public forum or as a customer service channel, you can enable posting to the timeline. Go into your page settings and click Posting Ability. The two options allow you to enable or disable user posts. When enabled, you can choose whether to allow picture and video posts.

You can also choose to review posts before they are made, so you can keep spam down while still allowing user posts. Set this option and save your changes.

Creating Collaborative Ads Groups

If you are a social media management agency, or you otherwise are managing the advertising of multiple pages, it can be a huge pain to log in and log out of multiple accounts every day. Facebook’s solution is to allow you to create an Account Group. These groups are essentially allowing ads access to multiple accounts from one singular account. In other words, your primary account can manage the ads for all of the ads accounts at once.

Allowing Others to Access Ads Accounts

If you want to allow someone else to manage your advertising for your page, as a page admin, go to your ad account settings. Once there, click to add a user to your ads account. Enter their name or email address, the same way you would for a page administration role. Choose their access level and submit the changes. That user will be notified of their new access.

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Guide to Troubleshooting a Facebook Business Ad

Guide to Troubleshooting a Facebook Business Ad

If you’ve ever played around with Facebook ads, you know they’re incredibly complex. There are dozens of ways your ad campaign can go wrong, ranging from rejected images to disabled ads to payment issues and beyond. Often times, you barely have any idea as to why your ad isn’t working, and Facebook’s contact system is thin at best. Rather than wait a week or more for a response from them, let’s try to troubleshoot your ads manually first.

Ad Images Look Bad

The main reasons an ad image looks bad have to do with the resolution and size of the ad. Each type of ad, be it mobile, news feed, or sidebar, has recommended dimensions. Facebook has guidelines for the size of various ads, but a much better source of size advice comes from Jon Loomer.

If your ad image is too large or too small, it can appear distorted. Likewise, if the image ratio is off, it will appear stretched or squished. It’s like stretching a normal movie to a widescreen TV, or vice versa. Additionally, Facebook will compress overly large images in terms of file size, so extremely large PNGs will appear pixilated.

To fix this issue, make sure you’re using images that fit the dimensions of your ad placement.

You Need to Change a Boosted Post

When you boost a post – or run a promoted post advertisement – the copy of the post is set in stone as long as you’re paying to promote it. This is because it effectively becomes an ad, and Facebook reviews all ads before they can be promoted. You can’t change ad copy while the ad is running, regardless of the position of the ad.

In order to edit a boosted post, navigate to the post. Hover over the budget remaining and click the gear settings icon. Click to delete the boost. Once the boost is deleted, you can click the V in the top right and click to edit the post. Once you’re done editing it, save the changes and restore your boost, if you want to continue boosting the post.

This only applies to copy. You can’t edit the image of a boosted post in any way. You will need to pause the current version or delete it, create a new version with your variant image, and boost that version.

Ads are Running but Not Delivering

We’ve published a post about this topic – check our blog – but here’s a quick rundown.

• Check to see if the campaign, the ad set, or the ad is turned off. If you’ve disabled them at any level, they may say they’re running but are actually disabled. Make sure they’re on at all three levels.


• Check to see if your ad was actually approved. Facebook reviews ads before they go live. Prior to approval, your ads will be pending. If your ad is rejected, you will need to edit it and submit it for approval again.


• Check to see if you have a high enough budget and audience. Too narrow targeting and too small a budget make for an ad that effectively has 0 possible targets. Obviously, your ad can’t run in these situations.


• Check to see if you’ve scheduled the ad to run at a future date, or on a date in the past. Ads need to at least have the current date within its date range in order to run. If you scheduled it to start next week, it won’t be running right now.

There’s also the issue where your ads were working fine but have dropped off dramatically in terms of impressions. This can be caused by reaching your maximum budget limit, either for the ad or for your account in general. It also might be caused by the ad running for an overly long time, reaching a maximum frequency limit. Users tend to ignore ads after they have seen them more than once or twice, so once your frequency has reached 1-3, it’s time to retire the ad or choose a different audience.

Your Ad Relevance is Low

Facebook ranks ads by relevance in much the same way that Google provides a quality score. It’s also calculated in many of the same ways. A low relevance ad will have low priority when shown to users, particularly in high competition niches or targets. You can only see your relevance score once your ad has been seen by 500 people, and it’s not available for everyone.

If your relevance is low, you can improve it by making your ad more relevant. Shocking, I know. If users find your ad offensive, dial back on the cause. If they find it irrelevant, or if they click through and find the landing page is too disconnected, you will need to make your copy less misleading.

Relevance can also be affected by audience targeting. An ad for diapers might not be relevant to teenage boys, but to new mothers it’s very relevant. Change your targeting to better fit your audience for higher relevance.

Ad Targeting Isn’t Appearing

When you’re selecting targets for your ads, various problems can crop up. For example, you might want to target a specific country, but that country doesn’t appear. This is natural, because of Facebook’s limited presence in some parts of the world. You can’t choose geographic targeting for areas Facebook doesn’t have a presence in.

Interest targeting is also limited by availability, typically due to a topic being too small. You might be able to choose model trains as an interest, but not a specific make and model of miniature caboose. These change, being added or removed as interests wax and wane.

You also might know a certain targeting option exists, but find yourself unable to use it. This occasionally happens when you try to choose two mutually exclusive targets. For example, you can’t target just United States residents and also limit your ads to run only in a small town in France.

Other Ad Issues

There are dozens of other issues that might crop up, particularly in setting up ad groups or business managers, or billing. If you have issues in one of these areas, or an issue I didn’t cover – entirely possible, despite how comprehensive this post obviously is – you can check with Facebook’s help. I always recommend trying to figure out what’s going wrong manually before contacting their help desk, but you can use their knowledge base or community forums easily enough.

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Why Did Facebook Block Me From Advertising?

Why Did Facebook Block Me From Advertising?

There are any number of reasons why you might be blocked from the Facebook ads program, but all of them come back to one thing; a violation of the ads terms of service. These violations can come from various actions, however, and they fall into a few basic categories. If you’ve been blocked, check through these and see what horrible mistake you made.

Were You Really Blocked?

Before you check to see if you violated the terms of service, you might want to check to see if you were really blocked. It’s not common, but I have seen people asking about being blocked from the system, when they were just trying to access it from the wrong account. They also might have gotten their ads rejected, which is not the same thing as being blocked from the program.

If you were actually blocked from the program, you will see a message like one of these when you try to access it:

• Your account has been disabled. Your ads have been stopped and should not be run again. We disable an account if too many of its ads violate our terms of use.


• Your ad account has recently been flagged because of unusual activity. For security reasons, any ads you’re running will be paused until you can confirm your account information.

With that in mind, here are the various causes of an ads program block.

Unrecognized Account Access

This one is simple, and can happen to anyone who travels frequently. When you log in to Facebook’s ads program, it checks your location based on your Internet connection. If you typically always access your account from New York, and the next day you happen to travel to China for business, Facebook will see you accessing the ads system from China if you try to log on. This matches known hacker activity – accessing an account from outside the country of origin – and thus causes an automatic block.

Ideally, this is in place to lock your account and keep hackers from stealing your information, running ads for their own content using your budget, or otherwise compromising the integrity of the ads system. Unfortunately, it can hit business travelers as well, and cause a multi-month hassle getting your account unblocked.

Financial Issues

Various financial issues can cause a block from the ads program. Specifically, if you try to run an ad using a credit card and the credit card bounces the payment, Facebook will immediately halt the ad, leave a charge on your account for any budget used but not paid for, and will block your account for financial fraud. This can happen for any method of payment.

Another financial issue is if you try to use 2-3 credit cards, or more, and they are all deactivated. This is activity typical of a fraudster trying stolen credit cards until they find one that works. Facebook doesn’t want to enable fraud, so will deactivate an account that looks to be doing something like this.

You may be able to get such an account unblocked, but Facebook takes financial fraud very seriously. Be very careful with adding and removing payment options.

Ads that Violate Guidelines

There are a ton of guidelines that regulate what you can and can’t do with your ads. Here’s a selective list:

• For news feed ads, you can’t surpass more than 20% text in the images you use. Your sidebar ads can have any amount of text. This is highly subjective, using Facebook’s wonky grid tool.


• You can mention Facebook in your ads, but it needs to be written normally, capitalized. It can’t be replaced with the logo, it can’t be pluralized or verbed, and it can’t be altered.


• You can’t advertise age-restricted material to an audience that’s under the minimum age. For example, advertising alcohol to an audience that includes people under legal drinking age. Likewise, you can’t advertise any illegal or controlled substances, like prescription drugs, illegal drugs, or firearms.


• You cannot use sexually suggestive or explicit images in your ads. In some cases, even basic cleavage can get an ad removed, if it’s not tastefully presented.


• You cannot use images that are meant to shock, scare, or otherwise cause a dramatic negative response in viewers. This includes implied violence or, as they often use as an example, images of car crashes.


• You cannot use language that targets specific people, or specific demographics. For example, you cannot say “Are You Christian?” in your ads. You can’t use names or demographic information directed at the viewer.


• You cannot falsely advertise your product or service.


• You can’t link to a page that serves malware or viruses, that disrupts the user’s ability to navigate away from the page, or that loads and plays a video or audio track automatically.


• You can’t feature a video “play button” in your images.


• You cannot use “before and after” comparison images.

There are also a few types of restricted content. Alcohol, as mentioned before, is restricted by age in various geographical locations. Dating sites cannot be advertised at all, unless you have prior permission from Facebook. Lotteries and gambling games cannot be promoted at all, except for government lotteries, and then only by the government in question. Online pharmacies are completely blocked.

Data Usage Violations

In addition to all of the various content restrictions, Facebook has data usage restrictions. If you’re collecting data from the users who view your ads, that data must be protected. You also cannot use the data with other advertisers, for retargeting outside of Facebook, or piggybacked through redirected URLs.

Facebook also doesn’t want you to use advertising data to augment or edit user profiles in any way, including your own profiles. This is a nebulous rule, but it also rarely comes into play.

Anyone can be blocked on Facebook. Some people find it easy to get the block lifted; all they need to do is contact Facebook directly, submit proof of their identity or the validity of what they were doing, and the block disappears. Others will have a harder time. Sometimes, Facebook will just reaffirm their decision, and you will be forced to make another ads account. If you do, use different personal and financial information, lest Facebook blocks your new account as well.

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Approximately How Much is a “Like” Worth on Facebook?

Approximately How Much is a “Like” Worth on Facebook?

These days it seems like everyone on Facebook is obsessed with getting more likes. Heck, it’s even a better obsession today than in the past, because there’s a more widespread understanding that it’s the quality of the like that’s important, not just the quantity of likes. It begs the question, though; just how valuable is a like?

I can’t give you that answer. The trouble is, it varies from business to business and even from like to like. There are a lot of factors going into this value calculation, and there are different ways to consider value. Let’s take a look at them, shall we?

Factors Affected the Value of a Like

The first important factor is, as mentioned above, the quality of the like. You could have a million likes from robots run by a few dudes in India, and they might as well not exist. Their effective value is zero. On the other hand, quality likes – people with the interest and potential intent to buy your product – are worth a hell of a lot more.

The cost of your product or service is another factor. When a user converts, how much profit does it bring in? If you’re a business selling $10 balloon animals, first of all, congratulations on monetizing the concept online, that’s pretty cool of you.

Secondly, the value of an individual high quality like is probably only $10, maybe $30 or $40 if they’re going to buy more than one balloon animal. On the other hand, if you’re a business selling $150,000 mecha-cars, you’re going to have much more valuable fans. One quality like would be worth $150,000, assuming they convert. That makes one quality like on your mecha-car business worth 15,000 quality likes on the balloon animal business.

A third factor, if you look at it the right way, might be the size of the friends list of the person liking your page. This comes from an engagement and EdgeRank standpoint. When a user shares a post you’ve made, people on their friends list see it. If a user has 10 friends, that’s 10 more people who might see your post. On the other hand, a user with 1,000 friends might show your post to a few hundred people when they share it. In that sense, a follower with more friends is more valuable than a follower without.

This is sort of an indirect measure of value, though. None of the people seeing your post are worth anything to you unless they then like your page, click through to your website, and convert. At that point, they’re first-degree connections rather than second-degree connections, so the point becomes moot.

Value of Purchasing Fans

Here’s one way to look at the value of a fan; how much does it cost to acquire one? This is where some of those value factors come into play. For example, fan quality. Of course it’s cheap to spend $5 on 10,000 followers, but those followers come from click farms and are worth essentially $0 for your business. In fact, since you spend money to acquire them, they’re worth a negative amount of money.

The closest thing there is to an expert on the subject would have to be Jon Loomer, who has spent years and thousands of dollars on managing Facebook advertising for a variety of brands, and has extensive experience. His opinion is that you should expect to pay anywhere between $0.20 and $1.00 on a single relevant fan.

Fortunately for small businesses, your cost to acquire a valuable fan is more likely to be in the $0.20 range to start. This is because Facebook is very wide and has a lot of people who fit the description. As you build your audience, you exhaust your list of ideal prospects and have to start reaching for the second best, and so forth. These fans grow more expensive to acquire, because you need to expose yourself to more of them to find the valuable fans.

This cost is slightly deceptive. This is the cost specifically to acquire the fan. You then have the additional cost of having to advertise to them until they convert, which can rack up. Depending on the advertising methods you use and the success rate, the cost of a conversion can vary dramatically.

In this sense, the value of a fan – in terms of cost to acquire – is low, under $1 each typically. But that’s just one way of looking at it.

Value of Fans Based on Conversion Rates

Here’s another way of looking at value; how much do you get out of a fan when they convert? Take our mecha-car example above. One fan converting earns you $150,000. That’s a heck of a lot of money, but it’s also a very hard sell. Not very many of your fans, even the highest quality fans, are really in the market for mecha-cars.

While the value of a conversion in this case is $150,000, that’s not the value of the fan. To find the value of the fan, you need to consider your conversion rate.

Imagine you have, say, 100,000 fans. Out of this stack of fans, only 100 of them convert in a given month. That’s a conversion rate of one in a thousand, or .1%. You had to acquire 1,000 fans in order to get one conversion, so you might be able to consider the value of the conversion as split amongst those 1,000 fans. In this case, the $150,000 mecha-car, split amongst 1,000 people, is only $150 per fan. The value of an individual fan, then, is $150.

Of course, this calculation varies dramatically as your conversion rate changes, and it’s a different calculation for different scenarios. For the balloon animal business, for example, one fan might convert many times throughout a year or their lifetime. One user probably isn’t going to buy more than one mecha-car, but they might buy a dozen or a hundred balloon animals. Value stacks up with repeat conversions.

The value of a fan is all in how you look at it. Try making a few calculations for your business and see what you come up with.

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How to Contact Facebook: A Comprehensive Guide

How to Contact Facebook: A Comprehensive Guide

For a global company with over a billion users and millions of people marketing through the site, Facebook is notoriously hard to contact. They have no online live chat, like Amazon. Their phone system typically directs you to online support, but their online support is positively massive. By massive, I mean their knowledge base has thousands of articles, their community forums stretch back for years and are chock full of posts about problems that were never solved, and they have numerous contact forms and emails for various problems.

Hopefully, by the time you’ve finished reading this, you’ll have a better idea of what avenue to take for a given problem.

Access Errors

These are contact methods you can use to reach Facebook if you’re having issues with accessing certain portions of the site or the site as a whole. They each have specific uses.

• Bad IP Issues – Use this form if you’ve been told you’re trying to access Facebook from an IP address that’s malformed or that is associated with malicious activity.


• Disabled Account (Violation) – Use this form if your account has been disabled due to a violation of the Facebook Rights and Responsibilities. It doesn’t work if you’re logged in.


• Disabled Account (Multiple Accounts) – Use this form if you’ve been blocked due to having multiple accounts, which is usually seen as a sign of impersonating someone.


• Disabled Account (Underage) – Use this form if your account has been blocked for being under the age of 13. It will ask you to provide documentation of your age.


• Disabled Account (ID Submission) – Use this form to submit a government ID to appeal a disabled account of any sort.


• Disabled Account (General Form) – Use this form if your account was disabled for any general reason not covered by another more specific form.


• Login Approval – Use this form if you can’t log in because you can’t receive or haven’t been sent a security verification code.

Reports

These are methods of contacting Facebook you can use if you need to report something, like a deceased person, an incarcerated person, or an imposter account.

• Imposter – Use this form to report an account that is impersonating you or your business.


• Imposter (High Priority) – Use this form to report an account impersonating you or your business, when it is of urgent necessity that this imposter be removed.


• Incarcerated User – Use this form to report an account if that account belongs to a user who is incarcerated.


• Memorialization – Use this form if you or someone you love has passed away and you want your or their account memorialized.


• Memorialization Error – Use this form if your account has been memorialized as if you were deceased, but you are not deceased. If you are deceased, please don’t try to un-memorialize your account; Facebook is not a social network for the undead.

Advertising Issues

These are contact forms for both sides of the advertising coin. If you have issues with running your ads or with ad approval, use these forms. Likewise, if you have issues with the ads you see on your page, use these forms.

• Pending Review Issues – Use this form if your ad has been pending approval for over 24 hours and you have not received notice of rejection or approval.


• Ad Payment Issues – Use this form if you have questions or issues paying for your ads, using a coupon for the ads system, or need to dispute certain charges.


• Ad Visibility for Children – If you are the parent or guardian of someone Facebook over the age of 13 but under the age of 18, and you have a complaint about the ads that person is seeing, and you have already changed their privacy settings, use this form for further advice.


• Underage Account Takedown – Use this form to report an underage account anywhere the age limit is 13. If the underage user is in Spain or Korea, and they are under 14, use this form instead.

Copyright and Trademark Issues

Use these forms if someone is violating one of your copyrights or trademarks and you want Facebook to remove their account or issue a DMCA notice for that account.

• Copyright Violation – Use this form if someone is violating or infringing on your copyright on Facebook.


• Trademark Violation – Use this form if someone is violating or infringing on your trademark on Facebook. Why they need two forms for this, I have no idea. Actually they have five or six, but I’m not listing them all. This one should work fine.


• Content Removal Inquiry – Use this form to ask Facebook why your content was removed under a trademark or copyright violation. Chances are you will receive little or no help, but if you’re the legitimate copyright holder, you may have recourse through this form.

Business Page Issues

Use these forms if you are having issues with some aspect of Pages, whether it has to do with creating a page, verifying your page, merging duplicate pages or another assorted issue.

• Creation Errors – Use this form if you’re having trouble creating a page for some reason.


• Admin Security Errors – Use this form to send Facebook an ID as proof you are who you say you are when accessing your page as an admin and encountering a verification error.


• Page Verification – Use this form to receive a rejection notice on your request for verification. Unless you manage to actually receive verification. That would be novel.


• Duplicate Pages – Use this form to ask Facebook to help you merge two pages that exist for the same entity.

Feedback Forms

Use these forms if you want to complain to Facebook about some issue or another on their site, ranging from photos to post targeting to the help center. You probably won’t receive anything more than a form letter acknowledging your submission, but hey, maybe some intern will read it.

• Photos Feedback – Use this form to complain about something being broken in the photos app.


• Post Targeting – Use this form to complain about how useless or obtuse post targeting is.


• General Feedback – Use this form to complain to Facebook about anything Facebook-related. Note: This is the best form to use if you want your complaint to fall on deaf ears.


• Insights Feedback – Use this form to complain about Facebook’s Page Insights and how it isn’t as good as Google Analytics in exactly the ways you want it to be.


• Help Center Feedback – Use this form to complain about how the Facebook help center is so obtuse that you had to turn to a third party list of contact forms just to figure out how to complain about their help center.

The Facebook Community Forums

This is a link to the Facebook Community. This is a great place to go if you like seeing comment threads from two years ago about your problem, with no posted solution. It’s also a great place to post a question if you want to have four answers, one of which is another user posting an answer to a different problem, one being a spam link, and two being other people asking different questions in your thread.

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Facebook Campaign Not Delivering Results? Here’s Why

Facebook Campaign Not Delivering Results? Here’s Why

Facebook ads are complex at the best of times. To even run a single ad, you need to set up a campaign, an ad set, and the ad itself. It has to have a landing page, an objective, a title, an image, a positioning, targeting information, a budget, a payment scheme, and more besides. There are so many possible points of failure, let’s see what can go wrong.

Accidental Inactivity

When you look at an individual ad in your ads manager, you’ll see a reading of details. To the left is a switch that shows ad status, on or off. Then you see ad name, delivery status, and results. The rest goes from there. If you have 0 results but your ad is listed as active, you may have a problem.

The thing is, an ad can be listed as active but not actually BE active. Why? Look up at the ad set the ads are in. There’s a switch there too, that you can swap between active and inactive. So you can have an inactive ad set with a bunch of active ads in it.

This is possible because you might want to turn off a set of ads, while within that set are several active and inactive ads. When you want to turn the whole thing back on, you just turn the ad set on, and it doesn’t affect your ads themselves. If it didn’t work this way, you would have to turn off all of your ads individually, and when you wanted to turn them back on, you’d have to remember which ads you wanted to be active and which you didn’t. This can lead to accidentally playing the wrong ads at the wrong time, like running a promotion too early or after it has ended.

But wait, there’s more! What happens if you see your ad is set to active, and you go up and you see the ad set is set to active, but your ads still aren’t delivering any results? You guessed it; go up one more step. It’s also entirely possible that your entire campaign was disabled. If this is the case, you’ll have the same process for enabling it, and the same reasons for it being able to be disabled, just on a one tier higher level.

If you check and either of these proves to be the issue, just turn on the offending section of the ad structure and let them run again.

Too Low a Bid

Here’s another common problem that can affect those running ads, and it’s a surprisingly easy issue to have. When you create an ad, Facebook gives you a suggested budget. This is a pretty flexible number. You can set your bid at any point you want, and a lot of times, setting your bid lower is a perfectly valid strategy. Facebook estimates their idea of a good bid in order to reach a certain selection of people. A lower bid will limit your reach, but that isn’t necessarily a problem, particularly when you’re running test ads.

One common problem, though, is that Facebook’s estimates are just estimates, and they’re algorithmic estimates at that. They can’t take every factor into account. This leads to a common situation where you run a budget that claims it will reach, say, 100,000 people. When your budget is used up, reports show you only reach 1,000 people, and that to reach more, you need to spend more. This leads to many people claiming that Facebook ads are just a scam. Really, it’s just ad adjusted estimate based on practical evidence rather than theory.

The problem you might be facing with ads that don’t deliver is that your bid is so low that Facebook effectively can’t show it to anyone. This might be because your bid is so low that no single viewer is within your budget. Your bid is so low that your effective audience is zero. Your ad won’t be delivered, because you aren’t paying enough for it to be delivered.

You might also have an issue with setting a maximum bid. If you set a max bid and that bid is too low, you won’t be able to reach anyone. This isn’t the case if you’ve left your max bid set to Auto, though. When you’re checking over your bids, make sure you didn’t accidentally typo a decimal in the wrong place.

Another financially relevant issue with any PPC system is competition. If you put in a low bid, that’s fine, but if a bunch of competitors all target the same people in the same niche, your bid might be so low that you’re essentially out of the running. This isn’t a huge issue on Facebook, but even if it is, it’s still the same problem. Raise your bid to reach more people.

Payment Issues

Another financial issue is payment issues. If Facebook detects an issue with charging your account’s payment information, such as an expired credit card or an invalid Paypal address, they will automatically disable your ads and will confront you about it. It’s possible that you have some payment issue and need to get it taken care of.

Be very careful with payment issues on Facebook. They are very, very sensitive to fraud. This is partially because of the way Facebook bills you. They allow you to rack up credit, essentially, and when you hit certain thresholds, they charge you. The lowest threshold for starting marketers is $25. Technically, if you only spent $24 on ads, those ads would be essentially free. I don’t honestly know if there’s a time at which the unpaid credit ticks over and forces a smaller payment, I haven’t let any campaign run that long.

Because of the ability for fraud to happen, Facebook tends to take a zero tolerance attitude with payment issues. If your card is rejected or a payment reversed, Facebook will very likely just ban you from the ads program entirely. You’ll have to jump through a lot of hoops to get back in their good graces, a process that can take months.

Reporting Delay

Facebook isn’t necessarily a real time reporting agency. When you run ads, you aren’t always getting data immediately when a user clicks an ad or follows a link. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, which samples data and has a 24-hour delay in most cases. If you just created an ad, even if you expected it to tear through your budget in a matter of minutes, you might not see the results for hours or for a day. Try waiting for a day or two and see if any data shows up.

The post Facebook Campaign Not Delivering Results? Here’s Why appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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5 Facebook Ads Case Studies of Successful Campaigns

5 Facebook Ads Case Studies of Successful Campaigns

There’s a lot of debate online about how effective Facebook marketing is. Some people staunchly defend it as effective, and offer themselves as proof. Others claim it’s a giant scam and likewise claim their experience is the norm. Few take industry into account, and fewer dig deep enough into the data to explain their positions. The fact is, Facebook ads are very potent, and here’s a heaping pile of data to prove it.

1. Ace Hardware

For a hardware store, spring is the beginning of the busy season. As soon as the snow melts and the sun comes out, the ground thaws and plants start to bloom, people leap into action with projects ranging from home improvement to landscaping to new construction. All of them need hardware, and for a chain with 4,400 stores nation wide, this is absolutely when you need to be contacting your potential customers.

Ace Hardware needed to reach these customers, and it took to Facebook to do so. They started using Facebook as to promote a week of discounts specifically for fans. For targeting, they chose to direct their ads towards people via keyword, using home improvement and repair keywords.

As a result of their campaign, their following grew from 20,000 to nearly 50,000 in the span of four days, a growth of 132%. Their CTR skyrocketed, with over 50,000 clicks sent to their website from Facebook during the promotion. Meanwhile, fan posts on their page grew by 900%.

2. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is a chain of dinner-and-a-movie cinema-restaurant hybrids that serve meals along with movies, with an extensive pre-show. They began in Texas and have since expanded across the country with locations in Virginia, Michigan, Colorado, New York, Arizona and Nebraska.

In order to entice and engage their movie-going patrons, Alamo decided to implement Facebook Deals using the check-in system. They gave rewards to customers who checked in to their locations, and in order to promote this feature, they took to Facebook ads. With ads that explained the virtues of their check-in system, including free movie screenings and free pint glasses, it’s no wonder they had success.

As a result of their ad campaign, more than 5,100 people checked in with the cinema in Austin, Texas. The cinema gave away 10,000 free pint glasses during the promotion, and received record levels of engagement and page likes during the promotion.

3. Baskin Robbins

Much like a hardware store, an ice cream shop kicks into high gear during the spring and summer months, and their business begins to drop off during the fall. Baskin Robbins wanted to do something about this drop-off and had the idea to take to a social promotion. Combining groupon-like ideas and social referrals, they created a special program call the Group Scoop.

A Group Scoop was an app on Facebook that enticed users to invite their friends to visit Baskin Robbins. One friend has to invite three others for a total of four. If the number four is reached, all four members of the group are given a coupon for a free scoop of ice cream. Any or all of the participants could already be fans of the brand, but Baskin Robbins specifically ran ads targeting non-fans to promote the event.

As a result of their ad campaign, Baskin Robbins gained over 200,000 likes to their Facebook page, all ice cream loving followers. 8,600 groups were successfully created, leading to the serving of approximately 34,400 free scoops of ice cream. All during fall, historically one of the slowest times for the brand.

4. Cheerios

For a cereal company, springtime is… well, no different from any other time. This case study goes against the format of the others in this list a little bit. Cheerios didn’t have a great Facebook page back in the day, and they really wanted to connect with their primary target demographic, which they had identified as mothers with young children.

In order to accomplish this, the cereal brand decided to run a charitable promotion. For every new like they got on their Facebook page, they would donate a book to First Book, a charity that delivered books to needy children. They ran advertisements on Facebook targeting all women over 25 – these days they would also include the presence of children in their targeting – and ran several premium page ads promoting their charity and the health benefits of the cereal.

As a result of their ad campaign, Cheerios grew an astonishing 1,500%, going from 9,000 fans to 130,000. They broke the record engagement rate for General Mills brands, and they ended up donating more than 124,000 books. Not bad for a relatively bland cereal.

5. Toyota Hybrid Synergy

A few years back, when alternative fuel sources for vehicles were relatively new and only just reaching affordable prices, Toyota decided they wanted to promote their Hybrid Synergy Drive, a special energy-saving engine. Specifically, they wanted to promote this drive in young drivers in Southeast Asia, including Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

In order to promote their drive, they created special video advertisements and ran them on Facebook as premium video ads. These ads – two in total – ran in conjunction with follow-up sponsored stories that reached out to potential fans who had seen the videos.

As a result of their ad campaign, the Hybrid Synergy page – not the Toyota page in general, but a specific page for the Hybrid drive – went from brand new to 50,000 followers in just three weeks. This is with only 13,000 video views, though the ad exposure reached over 7.4 million people. The brand engaged with 45,000 fans throughout the campaign.

If this is the kind of potential growth waiting for you, why would you ever be skeptical of Facebook ads? Here’s the thing; none of these ad campaigns are particularly clever or outside-the-box thinking. They’re fairly simple examples of “run a promote, promote it to a basic audience” and yet they lead to sometimes astonishing growth. That’s the power of Facebook ads.

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Are Facebook Page Apps Losing Their Significance?

Are Facebook Page Apps Losing Their Significance?

As a user, when was the last time you used a Facebook app? Now, if you eliminate the stray contest, when was the last time? For me, it was a heck of a long time ago; well over a year.

Now, as a business, how effective have your tab apps been? Have you even been using them? It seems like these days they’re only good for contests, and sometimes not even then. Half the time, it’s just easier to run a contest on your own site rather than through Facebook.

Are Facebook Apps Dead?

Well, by the strictest definition, Facebook apps aren’t dead. They still exist, and businesses still use them.

Now and then, a fun app comes out that hooks into Facebook and draws in millions of users. The Walking Dead used one to “dead yourself” in a push to try to zombify the world while hyping up the new season. Watchdogs, the PS4 game about hacktivism with an insanely huge budget and a hype train that derailed, had an app that skimmed your profile and made guesses about your life. It was pretty inaccurate for anyone with even the most basic privacy settings, but it was an interesting concept.

Beyond that, though, most businesses either never use apps, forget they exist, or use them for basic contests and noting more.

The Long Decline

Facebook apps didn’t just disappear overnight. They’ve had a long, slow decline since their glory days a few years back.

The first nail in the coffin was a couple of years ago. Back then, you could direct visitors, not to your homepage, but to a custom landing page inside a tab app. This page would direct the user to like your page in order to gain access to your content. It was essentially a landing page for your Facebook page; give them a value proposition, explain why they should like you, and hide any content until they do.

As an adaptation to this change, marketers learned how to direct ads at tab apps as landing pages. It only worked for visitors coming in through ads, but it was better than nothing, for a while.

The second stone cast at the body of the tab app was the overall realization that apps directed traffic away from the fan page itself. Fans would end up in apps, and might like the page from there, but they didn’t go back to see the page itself. Instead, they relied on Facebook’s algorithms to show them content they wanted to see. This was the same time Facebook’s organic reach really began to drop for businesses. Without paid promotion, a page would only see 15% of their visitors on any given message. Of course, today that 15% sounds like heaven for organic reach, but this was a different time.

The third hit was Facebook’s layout change. Before, there was a box full of graphical icons for individual tab apps right up below the cover photo. This was a great place to do something clever with images and tab apps themselves, as well as allowing users ready access to those apps. When Facebook removed the two-column feed and replaced it with one feed and one sidebar for static content, they moved tab apps from the top bar to the sidebar, and some length down.

Oh, you can still feature one app in the title bar, but it’s no longer a large graphical button. Instead, it’s just a single word or two in the bar, along with the easily-ignored “Timeline”, “About”, “Photos” and other Facebook apps.

The most recent blow to tab apps was heralded as the death knell by many marketers. Facebook removed the like gate. Up until this point, you could design an app to hide content, an ebook, an opt-in, a product page, an advertisement, or anything else. In order to gain access to that content, the user would need to like your page.

According to Facebook, this feature skewed the audience algorithms for businesses. Worse, it caused a lower organic reach for everyone involved. The people who like a page through a gate typically just wanted to see that content; they wouldn’t care about most of the rest of your page. Sure, some of them would stick around, but many wouldn’t, and having those users soaking up some of your organic reach is a problem.

Since then, fewer and fewer businesses have been using tab apps, particularly when they used to like gate the content in them. Many abandoned apps on the spot.

Can You Still Use Apps?

Of course, it’s still possible to create and use a tab app. You just can’t set it as your landing page and you can’t force a like out of someone. On the other hand, apps have become much more robust than the clunky, boxy days of old. These days, they’re fully functional microsites that work with both desktop and mobile users. The only trick is getting them to use it.

For one thing, you can still use a graphic and make them visible, just not on the top bar. Instead, the graphic appears down on the left sidebar. Use a graphic that helps it stand out compared to your list of followers and your pictures and videos.

You can still run contests. In fact, tab apps are the only way Facebook allows you to run contests. Are contests effective for growing a page? That’s debatable. You have to use them properly. You can’t just give away a random piece of technology; you won’t get any new followers who care about your content. They just want the gadget.

Tab apps also let you accent and augment certain features you want to enhance. Say you have a long and interesting history for your business; tell it in an interactive format in a tab app. You can even use video within tab apps, so you don’t need to use Facebook’s otherwise-limited video player.

Apps can be very useful, you just need to think outside the box to use them properly. They won’t get the same sort of throughput as ads, for sure, but they can be useful side projects.

The post Are Facebook Page Apps Losing Their Significance? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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How Many Likes do You Need to Be Facebook Verified?

How Many Likes do You Need to Be Facebook Verified?

Twitter, a while back, introduced the verification process to make sure users knew a person was who they claimed to be. This was most useful for businesses and celebrities, but small business owners, entrepreneurs and even high profile bloggers would get their verification after a little bit of work. Though, even the best intentions can’t prevent some user stupidity.

Facebook eventually rolled out the same sort of verification – it even has the same blue checkmark next to the user’s name in search and on their page – and for the same purpose. It’s meant to cut down on impersonations and identity theft, and in a world of smarter people, it would work.

Unfortunately, Facebook’s process for verifying accounts is obtuse. You might even characterize it as “arcane” and “impossible.” The question that brought you here is how many likes it takes to be verified, so let’s take a look.

At the top end of things, we have accounts like these:

• Facebook themselves, with 161 million likes.


• Christiano Ronaldo, an internationally famous soccer star with 103 million likes.


• Shakira, the Latin pop star currently in full baby obsession, with 100 million likes.


• YouTube, Google’s video service sharing popular videos, with 80 million likes.


• The Simpsons, a cartoon that has lost significant charm with the advent of computer animation, maintaining 69 million likes.

Of course, no small business is ever going to reach such illustrious heights. Many of us struggle to reach a thousand followers, or ten thousand followers. An, well, not everyone with millions of likes is verified. For example:

• Snaptu, the app developer partnered with Facebook, with 16 million likes.


• Hannah Montana, Miley Cyrus’s pre-madness Disney role, with 11 million likes.


• PC Gamer, a gaming magazine with a global audience and 2.9 million likes.

So, the sheer number of likes – and thus popularity – is not a deciding factor. I mean, you can look at the top Facebook pages sorted by fan count and the top several hundred are verified, with a few outliers, but those outliers prove the point. So what about the low end?

• Koka, Internet prankster and entertainer, is verified with only 53,000 likes.


• Young Chizz, a musician from NYC, is verified with 19,000 likes.

There are definitely small and mid-sized businesses out there who could use verification but don’t have it, despite having way more likes than these jokers. Why do they get verification and the rest of us don’t?

This is why I call Facebook’s verification process a nebulous and arcane mess. There’s no great way to get your page verified. In fact, there are only three ways a page can be verified at all right now.

Method 1: Let Facebook Do It

This is the method a lot of these celebrities have taken. The pages are popular and are run by the official social teams of these celebs, or by the celebs themselves, and Facebook takes notice. They step in and send the user a message; provide us some documentation and we’ll verify your page. It’s pretty damn unlikely for any of us to see this message unsolicited, though.

Method 2: Ask for Verification

You can request official verification review, but only if you fall into specific categories. Facebook says, in their help system, “Right now, we’re only accepting verification requests from Pages that represent celebrities, public figures, sports teams, media and entertainment.” One thing that’s conspicuously absent is businesses.

If you happen to fall in one of those above categories, or are on the brink enough that you can argue successfully that you’re in one, you can go to this form and fill it out. You need some form of official document, be it a drivers license, a passport, a birth certificate, an article of incorporation, or something else that Facebook allows.

Submit the document and request, and wait. You’ll hear back, eventually, and Facebook will either confirm your verification and give you the check mark, or they’ll turn down your verification request for either being the wrong category or not being notable enough.

Method 3: Be Impersonated. A Lot.

The primary purpose of verification is to eliminate imposters who are trying to negatively and maliciously represent your brand on Facebook. If you’re being impersonated, it’s either someone intentionally falsifying your brand, or it’s a parody account. Parody accounts are occasionally renamed or removed, but most of the time it’s only the malicious accounts that have definite action taken against them.

When you discover an account impersonating your business, you can report it to Facebook using this particular method. When you do, Facebook reviews it and may force the page to change their information or just delete it.

Occasionally, if there’s a serious impersonation problem, Facebook will go one step further and will verify your account to prevent future impersonation.

Do note that you’re not going to be able to manually trigger this event. I don’t want to see any of you verification-hounds going out there to make fake accounts of your own businesses and reporting them just to try to get verified in the aftermath. You’d probably get your IP banned, and then where will you be?

The moral of the story is, Facebook’s verification just isn’t something you can seek out. It’s more of an act of god or a fluke of nature; it just happens sometimes, and there’s not really anything you can do to make it happen. You could try to build a larger audience and attract more attention, but if you’re a business and not a celebrity, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle to try to get verification.

Don’t try. It’s not all that worth it on Facebook. If you absolutely must seek out verification, do it on Twitter. They at least will verify anyone, so long as you’re notable enough, have enough followers, or have a good reason to be verified.

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