10 Reasons Your Facebook Ad Isn’t Running Yet

10 Reasons Your Facebook Ad Isn’t Running Yet

It’s really annoying when you go to run some Facebook ads and you find that, for whatever reason, they just aren’t running. There are so many reasons they might not be running that it’s difficult to troubleshoot. Sometimes you spend more time trying to talk with Facebook support and scouring your ad manager than you did making the ad in the first place.

That’s why I wrote this checklist. These are most of the most common reasons your ads might not be working. Check them first, then you can determine if it’s a glitch worthy of calling Facebook support over.

1. It’s Pending Approval

This is perhaps the most common ads-related question ever asked on Facebook’s support forums. Facebook has to approve every ad that goes through their system, making sure it adheres to all of their guidelines and is fit for consumption. They don’t care if it’s targeted well or well written, of course; they just care that it doesn’t violate image, copy or targeting rules.

The ad approval process typically takes anywhere from 2 to 72 hours. The normal turnaround is between 12 and 24 hours, but when a holiday is involved, it can take 2-3 days instead. If you just created or changed an ad, it has to go through approval, so give it some time before it can run.

2. The Ad is Set Inactive

If your ad has been approved but it’s not running, you should navigate to it in your ads manager. There’s usually a little button alongside the ad that indicates whether or not the ad itself is active. If the ad is active, it should be running, though other issues can get in the way. If it’s inactive, it’s not running, not spending your budget, and not reaching your audience. Make sure your ad is turned on if you want it to run.

3. The Ad Set is Inactive

If you think this is the same as the previous step, read them again. Facebook ads are grouped into ad sets. Each ad set can have a number of ads, typically ads with similar goals. Often, businesses use ad sets to group the ads they’re split testing.

The thing people might not realize with ad sets is that the entire set can be switched on or off. If the ad set is turned off, all of the ads within will be inactive, even if they’re labeled active. This allows you to turn groups of ads on and off with a single button, rather than having to manually turn each on or off as the situation calls. This might not seem like much, but when you’re running dozens of ads at a time, being able to swap sets around at will is dramatically convenient.

4. The Campaign is Inactive

One step up from the ad set is the ad campaign, and guess what? These can be enabled or disabled the same way ad sets can be toggled. It has the same effect as well; a disabled campaign can have an enabled ad set with enabled ads and those ads still won’t run. Check to make sure your campaign, ad set, and ad itself is enabled in each location to make sure the ad runs.

5. Your Budget is Too Small

People very often proclaim how effective Facebook ads can be with a miniscule budget, typically citing “$1 per day” as a reasonable low figure. It’s easy to get this wrong, however, and put in too small a budget to reach any of your users with any sort of success.

Conversely, it’s possible when you have an ad that’s not running that you just blew through what little budget you set. If your audience is sufficiently wide, you might not even get any noticeable value from those ads. With poor targeting, you’ll end up spending all your budget on ads that get you nothing. The two main scenarios I can think of are having too low a budget for a website conversions metric, and using the website views metric with poor targeting so all the views come from people who don’t care.

6. Your Targeting is Too Narrow

Facebook has had bad experiences in the past with narrow targeting. They eventually increased the minimum limit for an audience, to avoid things like this happening. While that post was a harmless prank, it could easily be used maliciously. They don’t want to have that happen.

It’s possible that you got overzealous in adding targeting factors and made your audience too narrow. If your audience is extremely narrow, it’s possible that those people just aren’t browsing, or aren’t seeing your ads, for one reason or another.

7. You’re Violating an Ad Policy

Facebook has fairly strict policies for ads, and they’re surprisingly easy to violate. There are a bunch of image types you can’t use, including trying to use overt sex appeal to sell, or using anything that looks violent. These are some of the biggest roadblocks for advertisers. It’s possible that your ad was rejected and you haven’t yet addressed the problem.

8. Your Ad Was Rejected

This is more or less the same as the previous step, only it’s a little harsher. Violating policies is one thing, but if you’re too far out of line, it’s possible that your entire ad will be rejected and there’s nothing you can do. This can also happen if your website is flagged as something Facebook doesn’t want to advertise. Any ad you try to use to link to that site won’t work.

9. You’ve Capped Your Budget

I mentioned something about this earlier, but it’s worth noting that if you’ve reached your budget cap, your ads will still look like they’re running, when they actually can’t. All they need is for the daily/weekly/monthly cap to refresh and they can run some more, but once they reach that cap they won’t run. You need to either increase your budget or wait for that refresh.

10. Your Ad Is Running After All

Finally, sometimes it looks like your ad isn’t running when it’s actually running just fine. Facebook’s Insights are on a bit of a delay, so you won’t see real time results. Check back a day later and see if they’re reporting activity.

The post 10 Reasons Your Facebook Ad Isn’t Running Yet appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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Why Doesn’t The Promote Page Feature Work on Facebook?

Why Doesn’t The Promote Page Feature Work on Facebook?

Promoting a post on Facebook is a great way to get more people to see it, and consequently more people to engage with it, see more of your posts in the future, and grow your audience. You can promote posts directly from the post itself using Facebook’s boost feature, so it’s extra convenient. The boost feature is not without issues, of course, but at least it works.

Or does it? Some users are finding that the promote post feature either doesn’t appear or is grayed out. What’s happening here?

The Wrong Type of Post

Believe it or not, Facebook has some restrictions on the posts you can promote. I know, it seems really unlike them to limit the amount of money they bring in, but there it is.

First, you can only boost posts that you made as your page. That means any posts someone else made on your page, even if you made it as the account owner, can’t be promoted. You also can’t promote posts that were made by other pages. Why would you want to, though? Paying to advertise someone else isn’t a winning strategy. You can, if you want, promote a post that links to a site other than your own.

You also can’t promote posts older than about 3 years old. Any post written before June 21 2012 can’t be boosted. I’m not sure why you would ever want to look at posts that old, let alone try to spend money to promote them, but here we are.

Sharing Content Without Permission

Another reason you might not be able to boost a post is if you shared the content on your page. Shared content is technically not your own, but even if you’re sharing something that you have access to, it won’t always work.

Have you ever seen a notification on Facebook that a friend commented on a post, but there’s no way for you to add a comment of your own? Facebook is slowly removing those posts, but they’re a good illustration of privacy settings. The user in question has privacy set such that you can see the post, but you can’t respond to it. Chances are you wouldn’t even be able to see it normally.

Always make sure when you try to promote a post that the post has global visibility. You don’t want to try to promote something only for the target audience to be unable to see it.

Not Enough Page Likes

In order to access features like boosted posts, your page needs to have a particular minimum number of likes. Some reports say that the minimum threshold was 400, which is quite a bit for a lot of small businesses. Others also say that the number was lowered to 100, a much more reasonable figure to start paying for advertising.

This is basically just for boosting a post, which can be considered something of an advanced technique, despite how easy it is to do. This is primarily because of how easy it is to get wrong without ever knowing it.

If you want to boost a post before you have the 100 minimum likes necessary, you can create a page post ad. To do this, you need to go into the ads manager and create a promoted post. Follow the guided prompts to fill out information, choose the specific post, and set your budget.

Blocked From Advertising

Boosting a post is essentially just creating a page post ad, which itself is a form of paid advertising. This means that boosting a post is part of Facebook’s general advertising program. Therefore, you need to follow the rules Facebook sets forth about advertising if you want to stay on their good side.

It’s possible that, if you can’t successfully boost a post, you’ve been flagged for some abuse of the system. Facebook has a lot of regulations in place about what you can and can’t advertise, so if your boost doesn’t work, you might check on that.

Another issue is just having the boost approved. Boosted posts are ads, and ads need to be reviewed to make sure they meet advertising standards and guidelines. IF you don’t meet those guidelines, you won’t be able to boost the post. It’s also possible that the boost doesn’t take effect immediately, because it needs to go through that approval process. Don’t try to boost a second time while waiting on the first; it doesn’t work.

Too Narrow Targeting

Now what if you don’t mean “I can’t promote a post” and instead mean “my promote posts aren’t working”? In this case, it’s possible that you’re encountering one of the many common issues that lead to ineffective advertisements. For example, targeting.

Boosting a post from the post itself gives you very little in the way of targeting options, but they can conflict with any targeting you put on when making the post itself. When you use two targeting factors, Facebook creates a prospective audience out of people who share both features. This can lead to overly small audiences if you’re not careful. Your promotion will run, but you gain nothing because virtually no one can see it.

Too Small a Budget

This is a related issue. People will tell you that there’s no budget too small to run ads, but that’s not quite true. If your promotion targeting is such that you need to spend $1 per click, but you only plug in a budget of 50 cents, you’re not getting any clicks.

Admittedly, this isn’t a very common issue. You can put in $5 or $10 and still have a fairly broad audience, though you may not get as much exposure as you would with a different sort of ad. Still, check your budget and make sure your promotion is valid and viable.

If after all of this your promotions still don’t work, consider contacting Facebook directly. It’s possible that you’re actually experiencing a glitch with the platform, something only Facebook can fix. If that’s the case, they need to know about it before they can fix it.

The post Why Doesn’t The Promote Page Feature Work on Facebook? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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How to Pay for Your Facebook Ads with PayPal

How to Pay for Your Facebook Ads with PayPal

Facebook offers a number of different payment methods for their ads. It’s in their best interests to give you as many ways to pay them as possible, right? The thing is, this interest combats with another interest they have, which is to avoid fraud. It’s a sad fact that there’s a lot of financial fraud going around, ranging from using fake information, linking dead accounts and using stolen credit cards. Facebook doesn’t want to fight credit disputes or see money seized, so they’re picky about how they accept payments, despite the numerous methods.

PayPal is perhaps the best option for many marketers, particularly marketers located outside of the United States. If you don’t want to link your credit card, or you want the additional buffer of a company between you and Facebook, try PayPal. There are a few ways you can use it, as well.

Method 1: Direct PayPal

This is the primary means you can use to link PayPal to Facebook Ads for payment.

1. Make sure that your browser will accept a pop-up from Facebook and PayPal. You can go into your Internet options and disable your pop-up blocker, or you can just watch for the bar that appears when your browser has blocked a pop-up and tell it to enable it.


2. Go to your ads manager. If you don’t know where that is, just click this link.


3. In the ads manager, click “billing” and then click “payment methods.” This will bring you to a section where you can add or remove existing payment methods.


4. Click to add a payment method. This option is found in the top right of the screen. One of the options will be to choose PayPal.


5. Click to continue. This will generate a pop-up with a PayPal authorization window. You will need to input your login information through this window to authorize Facebook to draw from your PayPal account to pay for advertising.

This isn’t necessarily always the best option, unfortunately. PayPal occasionally has issues with Facebook, and while you might be able to get things sorted out quickly, you can lose some money in the process. Another problem is that using PayPal alone means you’re going to have another account for bookkeeping, unless you use another method that lets you use PayPal for other expenses.

One of the most prominent issues, though, is that Facebook restricts the currencies it will accept as payment for Facebook ads. The list is pretty long and includes most major currencies, including the Dollar, the Peso, the Dirham, the Rouble, the Koruna, the Euro and the Yuan. What happens, though, if your currency isn’t accepted?

If that’s the case, you will need to use PayPal to convert your currency into a currency Facebook accepts. This is relatively easy through PayPal, but it comes with a fee attached. This is unacceptable when we’re talking about Facebook ads. When you’re fishing for pennies in your ads, optimizing them to spend a few cents less per click, you can’t afford to throw percentage points away on currency conversion.

So what do you do if you don’t want to link PayPal, if you want to use PayPal as a more widespread payment option, or if you want to minimize the currency conversion issues?

Method 2: PayPal Debit Mastercard

The answer is the PayPal debit card. This card works just like a debit card issued by any bank or financial institution. You have a card number, a name, an expiration date, a validation code, and a linked account. When you make a purchase with the card, it’s deducted from the balance on the card.

One of the primary benefits of the PayPal card is the rewards. It acts somewhat like a credit card, in that it has FDIC backing, rewards, and interest for balances. There’s even a referral program that gives you $5 when a friend signs up using your link and puts $10 on their card. Lastly, you’ll earn 1% cash back for every credit purchase.

PayPal is a modern company, and they realize that a lot of users prefer to manage their accounts via mobile devices. This is particularly true of Facebook users, who are growing increasingly mobile-focused these days. PayPal has a specific task app for the prepaid cards – so it’s additionally segregated from your main account, in case you lose your device – through mobile devices. You can find the iPhone version here and the Android version here.

PayPal’s debit card has one major drawback, and that is the process for approval. The card is treated as a credit card, and therefore needs you to go through a strict approval process. Part of this comes down to the Patriot Act, which requires that PayPal records information about cardholders.

PayPal does also have a debit card that’s directly linked to your account and acts more like a traditional bank debit card as opposed to a prepaid card.

The process for linking one of these cards, by the way, is mostly the same as the process above. You need to go into your ads manager and click to the billing section. In that section, you need to click on payment methods and click to add a new payment method. You won’t be adding PayPal this time, though, you should just be able to add a new debit/credit card. Just use the card information from your PayPal card and it will work just fine.

There are also other prepaid options available for non-US users. To find out which ones, reference the table Facebook provides here. There aren’t many, though, and that’s because Facebook doesn’t want to deal with prepaid card fraud if they can help it.

The post How to Pay for Your Facebook Ads with PayPal appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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Are Facebook’s Algorithm Changes Hurting Small Business?

Are Facebook’s Algorithm Changes Hurting Small Business?

Normally on this blog, we talk about the nitty gritty technical details of Facebook updates. We mention when they come out, what they do, what effect it has on your business and how you can counteract any negative effects.

Today, I’m going to talk a bit about a more overarching viewpoint. Facebook is constantly changing its algorithm, for better or for worse. Is it hurting small businesses in doing so, or do the changes improve the system in the long run?

The Ever-Changing Goalposts

The first way many people say Facebook is hurting small businesses is their labyrinth of requirements, rules and goalposts. Every update, it seems, changes something that’s relevant to small businesses. What works one day might be a ban-worthy technique the next.

Contests are one good example. It seems easy for a business to post a picture, ask for shares on the picture as contest entries, then pick a winner from among the shares. And why not? It’s a little difficult to monitor, but it’s quick and functional. It’s also against the Facebook rules. The same goes for any contest whatsoever that isn’t managed through an app. Yet you still see these non-app contests every day, from businesses that didn’t get the memo.

Like gates are another example. One of the most common strategies a business could use was to hide their page or their content behind a page like. If a customer didn’t like the page, they couldn’t get the free content. Then, end of last year, Facebook banned the like gate and removed the function from their API. How many small businesses that have left their pages idle still have like gate code on their page?

Small businesses often don’t have the budget to hide someone to manage their pages for them. They have to do it in-house, often with the owner of the business themselves taking that role. Yet, as we know, running a successful page can be a full time job. These small businesses don’t have the time, money, or motivation to dump into a Facebook page that, at that level, isn’t showing returns.

We all know there’s a point at which a Facebook page turns from an expense sink into a profit maker, but it takes time and effort to reach that point, and there are often much better ways a business can spend that time and effort. Facebook constantly changing the rules only makes it harder for small businesses to succeed when they’re barely above water, so to speak.

The Decline of Organic Reach

Speaking of keeping barely above water, Facebook is making that harder and harder as time goes on. There’s a lot of debate about the reason for the decline in organic reach.

The conspiracy side claims that Facebook is causing organic reach to decline specifically so they can get more money out of businesses as they pay for boosted posts, which themselves are inefficient and expensive compared to ads that require skill and knowledge to create.

The more rational side claims that while organic reach is dropping, the people who see your message are still valuable. You lose access to the people least likely to care about your posts, but that’s not a bad thing.

Making Facebook Pay to Win

This is the side effect of declining organic reach; you have to invest in paid reach in order to get the sort of exposure you’re used to. The long, slow decline in organic reach is enough to counteract the long, slow growth many businesses expect. This leads businesses to feel as though their efforts are getting them nowhere.

In order to rise above the decline, to reach a point where your Facebook page becomes more self-sustaining, you need to invest in paid promotion. Both sidebar ads and news feed ads, as well as mobile ads, are all valid methods of getting ahead. The problem is, they’re quite expensive, particularly when you’re just starting out and don’t have the targeting information or audience foundation necessary to really put them to use.

Small businesses tend to have tight budgets, unless they’re the result of an over-active Kickstarter campaign or something. They don’t have the money to spend on an agency running the page for them, and they certainly don’t have the money to try and fail with advertising for a while before they figure things out.

Looking Into Audience Engagement

The one positive side, at least according to Facebook, is that the user experience for everyone – people and businesses – is improved with each change they make.

From the user perspective, this is more or less true. Each change does somewhat improve the quality of the news feed, generally by decreasing the number of valueless stories they see and improving the quality of the curated stories they do see. The problem is, this leads to very little company exposure that’s not through ads.

From a business perspective, well, you’re still reaching your most engaged and interested users. That’s how Edgerank works, by definition. You’re losing some exposure, but the people who would be seeing your message and now aren’t are the people who weren’t going to engage with it anyways.

Are Happy Customers More Important Than Happy Businesses?

In the end, this is the question businesses and Facebook have to ask. Facebook is making moves primarily to make their user base happier and more willing to use the site. This is in the face of predictions of their inevitable decline. They’re putting all their eggs in the user basket, while letting businesses figure things out.

Don’t get be wrong; businesses still get plenty of love and support. That’s where a lot of Facebook’s money comes from, and they can’t alienate businesses entirely. The just make it harder on newcomers, perhaps accidentally, or perhaps through a calculated decision. After all, a small business might start a page, spend $10 in ads, get nothing, and leave; catering to that business more, while simultaneously letting down a giant corporation like Coke, would be a poor financial decision.

In the end, Facebook is still effective, and businesses will still use it as long as it is. As soon as it stops being effective, businesses will find alternative means of advertising, even if it means leaving the site entirely. Sooner or later, that will happen; it’s just happening a little sooner with small businesses.

The post Are Facebook’s Algorithm Changes Hurting Small Business? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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How to Convert a Facebook Page to a Personal Profile

How to Convert a Facebook Page to a Personal Profile

A long time ago, there was no unity between Facebook profiles and pages. Pages weren’t some special thing; they were just profiles with a few added features. Back then, there was a lot of confusion over which type of account you wanted to make.

Today, it’s possible to find business pages that are actually for people; personal profiles using the page template, due to various optimizations and upgrades Facebook has implemented over the years. This would be fine, except business pages are limited in many ways, ways that make it implausible to use as a personal page. You can’t message people directly if they haven’t messaged you before, for example, and you can’t interact well with personal profiles.

Another possibility is finding a personal profile for a business. These are more common, because there’s nothing physically stopping you from making a personal profile for your business. It’s not a sensible idea, since it bars you from using most of the great business features, but it does give you that added bit of messaging functionality.

There’s also a not-uncommon issue where regular personal users, using regular personal profiles and not doing anything business-related at all, are finding Facebook railroading them into converting their profile into a page. This is very much an unwanted change, but Facebook tends to be difficult to contact, and getting them to drop this forced conversion is difficult.

So there are many reasons why you might want to convert a profile into a page or a page into a profile.

Oh, and one more thing; if you’re using a personal profile to run a business, stop. It’s against the Facebook terms of service, for one thing. For another, it’s really a lot less effective than just using a business page. Sure, pages don’t have the same default organic reach with followers as profiles have with friends, but reach isn’t the be-all and end-all goal of marketing on Facebook. Business pages also have access to a massive number of tools, not to mention insights and all the audience targeting options. Plus, it’s all available to pages regardless of the size of those pages or the size of their budgets. It’s not as though a page is the paid option while a profile is free; pages are free to create and run. It’s only advertising that costs money.

Oh, and if Facebook catches you using a personal profile to run a business, they’ll either force you to convert with no option to decline, or they’ll just delete your account. So, there’s that.

Converting a Profile Into a Page

Converting a personal profile into a page is the easier of the two conversions. All you have to do is go to the Profile to Page Migration page, found here. You will be asked to choose a category for your new page, and then a sub-category. You will fill out a bit of information, confirm some other information and you’ll be good to go.

Before you do the conversion, however, you should make sure that if you’re the admin of any groups. You’ll lose access to groups with that account when you’re a page.

When you make this conversion, some information will be saved and transferred over. All of your existing friends will be automatically converted into followers. Your profile picture will become your page profile picture, and your username will stay the same. If you manage any other pages, your role will stay the same for those pages as well.

Any other information, including posts and messages, you will need to download before you begin. You can’t upload it later or anything, so consider this an archive. You lose admin status for groups, as mentioned above.

Converting a Page Into a Profile

This is the opposite action, and it’s a lot harder.

First off, while logged in as your page and not a personal profile, click this link. That link is the form for submitting a request for reversal to Facebook.

A request for reversal is a form that goes directly to Facebook. Once they have received it, they will review your case and determine whether or not your page should actually be a personal profile. Do your best to make your case, because they’re not likely to give you the freedom of requesting a second time.

If your page is actually a business, you will not be able to convert it into a profile. In fact, there are only two reasons why this reversal would work at all. The first reason is when you manually convert to a page from a profile, following the instructions above, but you didn’t actually mean to. It’s an easy mistake to make, and it could even be perpetrated by a hacker who has gained access to your profile.

The other reason is if Facebook forced you to convert under the mistaken impression that your profile was running a business. If you can prove to them that you were not in fact running a business, they’ll be much more likely to consider your reversal request.

You can’t, unfortunately, request a reversal if you didn’t convert your page to begin with. For example, if you just created a page, but that page has never been a profile initially, you can’t convert that page into a profile. There’s no automatic method for this, because there’s typically very little reason for the process to exist.

If you fall outside the bounds for a reversal, you can always try contacting Facebook directly. There are dozens of contact forms, contact emails and phone numbers scattered throughout their help center; find one and see if you can get through to a real human.

Oh, and as a side note, there’s no way to convert groups or events or any other style page either to or from a business or personal page. The best you might be able to do is change the category of a page from one thing to another, but that doesn’t have many limits on functionality anyway. Most pages have access to all the same features as any other style of page.

The post How to Convert a Facebook Page to a Personal Profile appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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Why is The Ad Target Audience Feature Not Working?

Why is The Ad Target Audience Feature Not Working?

Sometimes you just want a quick and easy way to get more traffic to a post. Facebook would love it if you boosted the post, but many savvy marketers will go ahead and create a basic news feed ad in their ads manager instead. Sometimes, though, you encounter a problem.

Specifically, when it comes time to plug in your audience options, Facebook stalls out. You end up with an endless cycle of loading bars with nothing happening. Your first thought might be to edit the existing audience rather than load a new one, but this one just plain doesn’t save. As a whole, you can’t change the audience targeting. If you’re lucky, the existing targeting is something you can use; otherwise, you have to figure out what’s causing the issue.

Browser Incompatibility

Sometimes, the web browser you’re using is causing the issue. Facebook as a whole is compatible with most browsers, including Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera. Some features may have issues with some browsers, however, particularly if you’re using an old version of a browser. Old versions of Firefox and IE are particularly vulnerable to issues.

Facebook also looks at your cache and cookies when loading data, and occasionally something will be corrupted in the process. You would need to force your browser to load the data fresh from the Facebook servers.

Browser extensions can cause issues as well, particularly if they’re extensions that change how your browser handles ads and scripts. Overzealous filtering blocks essential scripts from loading.

There’s also the rare instance where a browser update will break something. If you only began encountering the problem after updating your browser, do a temporary rollback and see if that works.

The general process for troubleshooting browser issues is easy.

1. Check for updates. Make sure your browser and all of your extensions and plugins are up to date. This is just good practice, as updates typically fix bugs and close security holes.


2. Clear your cookies and cache. The exact process for doing this varies from browser to browser. You can find Facebook’s instructions for doing so here. Note that by clearing your cache and cookies, you will likely need to log in to most websites again, including Facebook. These sites will also take longer to load, as you need to download files that are usually cached.


3. If the problem persists, it might be an issue with your extensions. Find the extensions menu (In Firefox, it’s under Tools – Add-Ons) and go through the list. Remove any you don’t need, as this is standard good practice. Disable your extensions one by one and try to set an audience. When you find an extension that is affecting usability, consider finding an alternative that doesn’t break Facebook audience targeting. Adblock Pro can also cause issues.


4. If all else fails, consider using an alternative browser. For example, if you’re using Firefox, try Chrome. Chrome is the de factor recommended browser for Facebook ads, simply because it’s the only browser to natively support Power Editor.


5. If the problem persists with multiple browsers, contact Facebook support. To do so, follow the instructions here.

Using the Power Editor

Usually, when this problem crops up, it’s an issue with boosting posts or creating a news feed ad from your basic browser ad manager. This means that one possible workaround for the issue is to use a more powerful editor. Specifically, I’m talking about the Power Editor.

The Facebook Power Editor is a very powerful and robust tool that takes the form of a Chrome extension. You can only use it with Chrome, so your first step should be to download and install that browser if you don’t already use it.

The second step, then, is to go to the Power Editor page to download and install the plugin for Chrome. This will give you access to a whole bunch of features in addition to the standard ad manager features.

Within the Power Editor, you’ll want to create your ad the same way you might create it from the normal ad manager. Everything will look a little different, and you’ll have more options; feel free to adjust them as you see fit. Once you get to the audience targeting section, it should work just fine. If it doesn’t, use the instructions from step five above to contact Facebook support.

Issues with Boosted Posts

There’s one other scenario where you might find ad targeting non-functional, and that’s when you’re trying to adjust a boosted post. The Boost button on a Facebook post takes that post and turns it into a news feed ad, but it sets many of the options automatically. Among those options are the targeting options.

This is part of the problem with boosted posts, along with some budget issues other marketers have covered. They tend to be overly restrictive. If you don’t have any custom audiences – and if you’re using the boost function, you probably haven’t gotten that deep in Facebook ads – your options are limited to fans and friends of fans. This makes it difficult to use other targeting options with your ad; it’s hardly a true ad.

The other issue with boosted posts is the inability to edit them. Once you’ve put up a boost on a post, you can’t edit the boost settings, and you can’t edit the post. The only thing you can do is delete the boost. You will then be able to edit the post and boost it again, but this is a tedious process that you circumvent just by using the ads manager or Power Editor to make a news feed ad instead.

I always recommend using a real ad instead of the boost feature. It’s gotten better than it was when it first debuted, but it’s still not a very useful function.

Anyways, one of these methods should solve your problem with being unable to target your ads. If nothing works, you may want to contact Facebook directly; it’s possible that there’s a legitimate glitch with the system and only intervention from Facebook’s end will fix it. This is very rarely the case, of course, and often issues will work themselves out just by refreshing the page or re-creating the ad.

The post Why is The Ad Target Audience Feature Not Working? appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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Should I Have Multiple Facebook Pages for My Business?

Should I Have Multiple Facebook Pages for My Business?

If you just started a business, and you asked me if you should make two Facebook pages, I would probably look at you as if you had two heads. You’d have to, to want to manage two of the things. It’s not sensible. All you would do is split your potential audience into two segments, likely unequal, and lose focus.

On the other hand, there are a few good reasons to have more than one Facebook page for your business. They’re just very rarely anything that a small business can consider.

Multinational or Regional Pages

See? I don’t know of any small businesses that have different divisions for different continents, but who knows, maybe there’s an exception out there.

For an example of this, take a look at Coca-Cola. They have their normal Coke page, then they have other pages for other areas, like Coke Australia.

The main reason a business like Coke would want to divide up their pages is for specific deals and promotions. A deal for American Coke drinkers might not apply to Australian beverage fans, so it doesn’t make sense to build one unified audience.

This is also a case where a higher follower count isn’t necessarily a good thing. If both American and Australian users followed the page, but the page posted primarily to an American audience, the Australian audience would cease being an engaged audience. Coke would lose the benefit of having those followers. By separating them into two audiences, they can maintain engagement separately.

Franchise Pages

The second reason a business might run multiple Facebook pages is franchising. They want to have a national presence, but they want each individual franchise location to have their own domain to control.

One example of this 24 Hour Fitness. They have one primary brand page, and then every individual location has a local page. Most restaurant franchises do this as well.

This gives the same benefit to the franchise as the regional pages do for corporations. Essentially, they have one central page for everyone to follow and like. It aggregates reviews, it’s a central hub for advertising and announcements, and it works just like any other Facebook business page.

Then they have individual franchise location pages, which accumulate local reviews and serve as boards for individual deals and promotions. If a single location is closing for renovations, they don’t need to clutter up the main page with announcements. They can also handle customer service on a local basis, with the option of escalating to the main page if necessary.

Business Divisions

This one you can look at Coke again, or you can look at a brand like Nike. Nike has a general Nike page, and pages for Nike Running gear, and Nike Air Max, Nike Basketball, and much more.

This is primarily useful for massive brands that want to keep individual product lines separate. I wouldn’t recommend it for a small business selling two or three pieces of software, for example; you don’t have the global presence to support product line pages. Nike has that support. Coke does as well, with pages for Coke Zero and Diet Coke, among others.

Dedicated Customer Support

This one isn’t a technique you see on Facebook, but it’s worth mentioning because of how prominent it is on Twitter. It’s not uncommon to have one Twitter account for your marketing and communications, with a second dedicated account specifically for customer service.

The primary benefit of this method are two-fold. First, it makes it easier to handle customer service. You have two different accounts managed by two different teams. You don’t need your marketing team to hand off messages to the customer service team, with all the delay that implies.

The second benefit is just to segregate customer service clutter. It helps businesses keep their professional profile appearance clean, so new users aren’t bombarded with potentially negative customer reviews; that’s all on the side account.

Managing Multiple Pages

If you’ve decided that your business is big enough to want to run more than one Facebook page, you have to decide how you’re going to do it. Are you going to have one dedicated social media team operating it? Are you going to outsource it? Are you running them all yourself, or are you letting individual franchises run their own?

If you’re hiring a social media company, you don’t need to do much else. Just work with them, they’ll handle the day to day operations.

If you’re letting franchises run their own pages, make sure to create a document of guidelines. Cover photos should be X image, profile pictures should be Y, your About information should include facts A B and C, and so forth. This helps you maintain a dedicated brand image without diluting it based on individual manager preferences or skills.

If you’re running all of the pages from one central location with one team, or just by yourself, they’ll all be tied to one account. With this account, you’ll want to set up the Facebook Business Manager. The Business Manager is made for any business running more than three pages, or any business running multiple ad accounts. It’s quite useful, and gives you a lot of features to streamline managing your pages.

You can, and probably should, use the business manager for franchising. This allows you to set other user accounts as managers of individual pages, without giving them so much control that you have to worry about account security, vandalism, hacking or other digital issues.

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How to View All of The Likes on Your Facebook Page

How to View All of The Likes on Your Facebook Page

When you’re running a business page on Facebook, your primary goal is to accumulate interested followers. Now and then, though, maybe you want to do something for those followers. Maybe you want to give something to someone who follows you, without forcing them to register for a contest. It would be cool to get a single readout of your entire audience.

Another reason you might want to see your full audience is to perform a fake likes audit. Facebook is getting better about removing fake likes – they even tell you when they do it now – but they don’t catch them all. Sometimes you just want to go through your audience and prune them out manually, as inefficient as that sounds.

So how can you see your full audience?

Step 1: Don’t

It’s unfortunate, but there’s no way to actually see your full audience. There’s no button you can click to see a full list of page followers. You can’t run some workaround search through the menu bar, you can’t scan Facebook via Google, you can’t export an audience and decrypt a CSV file, or anything else. It’s just locked to you.

Ostensibly, the primary reason for this is to avoid abuse. Facebook doesn’t want you to, for example, go through your followers and remove any that don’t fit your ideal demographics. You know if this was possible, some business somewhere would try to remove all the people of non-white ethnicities, or anyone who had a picture that fit their definition of homosexual. Worse, since Facebook doesn’t notify a user when a business removes their like, it would take a while to be discovered.

Another excuse defenders give for the limit on viewing your full audience is privacy settings. If a user is sufficiently locked down, an outside account won’t be able to see details about them, including the pages they like. This, oddly enough, extends to those very same pages. The page connection is different from the connection between friends, so it doesn’t give you any special access to the user’s page.

What Can You See

Insights does give you some information about your audience. The problem is, the data is all generalized. You can see what percentage of your audience is female, but you can’t get a complete list of all the females who follow your page.

You get a lot of generalized information from Insights. You can see gender, age, geographic location, language settings, and comparisons between them. That’s all just for your regular Insights; you can see some more information in the ads manager, by way of setting targeting options.

Minor Workarounds

The primary way to see people who like your page is just to click the likes section in your page. This will bring up a lightboxed list of recent likes. When you scroll down, you’ll find a button to see more. You can expand the box to see a few pages worth of users, mostly users who have liked your page most recently. The deeper back you go, the more users you can see.

The typical recommendation for auditing your likes, by the way, is to use that technique to see as many as possible. Remove the offending fakes in the recent list, and refresh it. The slots you emptied should fill with more followers, up until you have no more slots to fill.

Of course, this is hardly useful if your page has thousands of likes. When you can only see a few hundred, and only a dozen or so at a time, it quickly grows tedious to scan through them all.

Another suggestion I’ve seen is to go to your activity tab. In the recent notifications section there should be a “like” notification for the last time someone liked your page. It’s grayed out to look like it’s not a link, but you can click it and see a list if your likes. It is, again, not a full list of your likes, but it may show you a different selection than what the other methods do.

Advertising

Thankfully, you don’t need to see a full list of your likes in order to communicate with the people who like your page. You may not be able to see or export your audience, but you can still target them.

In the ads manager, or in the power editor, when you go to create an ad you’ll be prompted to add targeting information. One of the easiest targets you can make is just targeting your followers. This is what happens by default when you boost a post or createa news feed ad, and it’s what Jon Loomer recommends to get the most out of your product ads.

A similar form of targeting that you can’t see even the beginnings of as a page, is friends targeting. Rather than targeting your followers, you target the people who are friends of your followers. The idea is that they’re friends, so they must have similar interests, so it’s a good idea to target them. In reality, of course, this isn’t as useful as it may seem, but you’ll have to test it out to be sure.

You can also create a lookalike audience, which is an audience that shares demographics with your existing audience or a custom audience set. This is more useful than friends targeting.

How to Harvest Data

If you want to run a contest, or if you want to build an external list of your followers, the best thing you can do is use a tab app to run a contest or offer a deal with an opt-in. You can’t like gate content any more, but you can ask for an email address in order to sign up or download a file, and that gives you a means of contact. This builds a mailing list as well, which you can use in other circumstances.

This won’t get you your full audience, of course. Facebook posts, even the most aggressive ad campaigns, never reach 100% of your audience. If nothing else, there will always be someone running an ad blocker to make your life that much more difficult.

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How to Transfer a Facebook Page to Another Account

How to Transfer a Facebook Page to Another Account

I’m sure if you try, you can come up with a scenario where you might want to transfer ownership of a Facebook page. If you can’t, how about this; someone buys your company and you no longer need to control the page. It’s a surprisingly common scenario, and yet a lot of people don’t know how to give over control of a page.

I don’t blame them. The process isn’t difficult, and it makes sense, but it isn’t the easy “assign ownership of this page” button or the arcane “contact Facebook and get them to do it” method you might expect.

So, here’s the basic process.

Step 1: Be the admin of the page.

You can’t transfer ownership if you’re not an admin, for obvious reasons.

Step 2: Make the other person an admin.

There are a number of different page roles, each with different capabilities. Analysts only get Insights and the ability to see who posted as a page. Advertisers get access to the ads manager. Moderators can ban people, remove comments, and send messages as the page. Editors can make posts as the page, and edit page apps and data. Admins are the only role that can manage page roles and settings.

In order to make someone an admin, you need to click the Page Roles section in the settings menu on your page. Click the Admin drop down and select a role for the person, and then save your changes. You’ll be prompted to enter your password, to confirm it’s really you making the change.

Step 3: Remove yourself as an admin.

To do this, click settings and go to Page Roles. Find your name on the list and click the X next to your name. This is if you want to remove yourself entirely. If you just want to demote yourself, you will have to click the drop down and select your new role. Again, you’ll be prompted to input your password when you save.

In some cases, you won’t be able to remove yourself as an admin. No worries! Just have your newly appointed admin and business owner remove your permissions.

Step 4: Unlike and unfollow the page.

If you’re going to completely remove yourself from association with the page, you should also make sure to unlike and unfollow the page. Otherwise, it will still be on your list of followed pages, and you will still see updates.

Note that you do have to have someone else in the admin role before you can remove yourself as an admin. You cannot have a page with no admin.

There’s another possible way to get ownership of a page, specifically without going through this process. The admin who wants to be in charge needs to enroll in Facebook’s Business Manager. From inside the manager, an admin can claim the page and take ultimate ownership of the page.

This only works, however, if no one else has claimed the page through the Business Manager. If someone else has, you won’t be able to claim it, and you will need to go through a longer process.

Business Manager has more roles than normal pages, and correspondingly more functionality. It’s typically used as a sort of master role over a bunch of managed Facebook pages, such as a franchised business with numerous local pages. The roles are:

• Business Admin: the ultimate top manager, able to access and modify any aspect of the account, including deleting it.


• Business employee: an account capable of seeing all of the information in the pages, but unable to make changes.


• Ad account admin: an account capable of managing everything about ad campaigns, including reporting, billing and account permissions.


• Ad account advertiser: an account that can create ads using the payment information already set in the account.


• Ad account analyst: an account capable of viewing ad performance and analytics.

Additionally, all of the page roles – admin, editor, moderator, advertiser, and analyst – still exist in business manager.

In order to change ownership of an entire business manager account, you will need to follow roughly the same steps as the process above, only for the business manager section itself.

Step 1: Go to the business manager itself. Once logged in, go to settings.

Step 2: Click the “people” section on the left side of the screen. This will give you a list of page accounts. You can add people to this list using a different process.

Step 3: Click the name of the person you want to give ownership to and click to change roles. You will want to make them a Business Account Admin, which is distinct from a page admin role.

Step 4: Make the person an admin and notify them of their new status. The will then be able to log in and remove your admin permissions. You may be able to do this yourself, or you may not; it seems to vary based on how old the business account is, since Facebook has made changes over time and some features get lost.

Once again, once you’re removed from the admin role, you’ll want to remove your like and follow from the business page if you want to completely divorce yourself from it. If not, you’re free to keep your like if you desire.

Note: if you find yourself removed as an admin and you didn’t authorize the change, you will have to contact Facebook. You may be the victim of a hacked social account, and one of the other admins was compromised. Make sure you always follow proper security procedures to avoid this sort of event.

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Is It Possible to Redirect a Facebook Page?

Is It Possible to Redirect a Facebook Page?

A redirect is a time-honored method to get people who arrive at point A to end up on point B without making them manually click anything. It’s an incredibly useful thing to do in web management. Sometimes you need to change domain names. Sometimes you just relocate information from one page to another.

Redirects, when done properly, are perfectly safe for SEO as well. You might lose a little PageRank, but you can’t even check PageRank anymore, and the difference is miniscule. It’s only when you’re using chained redirects or something equally shady that Google gets involved.

Renaming a Page

On Facebook, redirects would be very useful, in theory. Let’s say your Facebook page is newly created. Often times, you’re assigned a number instead of a name for your URL. Where many brands have www.facebook.com/brandname, you end up with www.facebook.com/1994309812092840 instead. Obviously, this is neither catchy nor memorable, and it’s not something you want on your business cards.

If you’ve been at it for a while, you may have built an audience already using that URL before you realized you could change it. So, you go and change it, and that’s that, right? Your audience comes along for the ride. The page they saw in their news feed is still the page they see.

The reason a redirect might be useful here is for any off-site links you’ve made. Facebook’s widgets and share buttons might need a brief update, if you’re using a social comments or social sharing plugin. For other off-site links, you’ll need to manually change them or implement a redirect. More on that later.

Merging Pages

Sometimes, two businesses merge, or you just decide that having pages for multiple products is bad when one brand page would be better. Sometimes you even encounter the event when a previous defunct page and a new page need to be merged.

Facebook allows page mergers, though they have some restrictions. They carry over your likes, your check-ins, and so forth. They do not merge posts. Essentially, you merge Page A into Page B, maintaining the name and posts of Page B and adding the likes from Page A into Page B’s pool.

Facebook requires that the merged pages be the same entity. Two different product pages made by the same company could be merged, but might require a waiting period to review and make sure they’re really the same.

A redirect would be helpful here for links that point to Page A when the URL that becomes permanent is that of Page B.

How to Redirect a Facebook Page

So there are a few reasons why you might want users to be directed automatically from the page they enter to another page. Rebranding, renaming, merging; they’re all valid. Here’s the problem: you can’t.

That’s right. There’s no way, through Facebook or otherwise, to redirect visitors who come to one Facebook page and send them to another. To do so, you would have to add code to Facebook itself, and they don’t allow that kind of page customization.

Here’s the real kicker; Facebook doesn’t do it automatically either. If you change the name of your page, any links pointing to the old page URL just go to a broken page, Facebook’s 404 equivalent.

Redirecting Via Tab App

Well, if that’s a bust, what can you do? I recommend not merging pages or changing names, but that’s difficult to do in a lot of situations. If it’s at all possible to leave the old page alive with a message linking to the new page, without having to rebuild your entire audience, do so.

You can implement a redirect on Facebook, but you have to do it through a tab app, and it doesn’t work for visitors coming to the main page, only the app. Tab apps are basically just web pages that load in an iFrame inside the Facebook window, so that makes sense. A redirect built into one will just redirect a user to a page other than the tab app page. Is that useful? Probably not.

Redirecting from Website to Facebook

You can, however, redirect people in the other direction. When a user wants to go to your website, but you don’t have a website set up or your current site is under construction for a redesign, you can use a redirect to send them to your Facebook page as a placeholder.

There are a number of different considerations when redirecting. Sometimes, the method for implementing a redirect will depend on your web host, particularly in how you access your code. You can read more about it here.

Reclaiming a Used Name

When you merge a page, you take two Facebook URLs and combine them into one. What happens to the old URL? If a user tries to visit it, they’ll be told the page no longer exists. If you try to register a new page using that name, it will say it’s already claimed. Is it possible to get an old username back?

Reports on this vary. Some people have said there’s a 90 day grace period, while others report six months. Some others say that there’s no way to reclaim an old used URL; Facebook doesn’t release them after a given time, they just hold on to them.

This makes sense, I guess; Facebook doesn’t want you merging a page and then someone else coming in to steal the old page and backlinks. It would be like parked domain spam all over again. Still, it’s annoying that Facebook keeps these old URLs around but doesn’t allow any sort of redirect to make the whole process of renaming a page easier.

It would be great if Facebook would implement redirects at the very least when merging pages, but as of now it doesn’t look like something they plan to do. As for reclaiming a username, let me know if you’ve ever been able to do it. I’m curious as to how long it took, and whether you had to go through Facebook support or not.

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How Do I Remove a Facebook Page from Business Manager?

How Do I Remove a Facebook Page from Business Manager?

Facebook’s business manager is a great app for some businesses in some situations. It’s not very good for everyone, and unlike the Power Editor, it can be a bit of a pain in the ass if you just want to play around with it.

See, with the Power Editor, all you’re doing is using a customized interface to interact with all of the functions that normally exist on Facebook in the ads manager. It just presents them in a more convenient, if less user-friendly way.

Business manager isn’t like that. It’s a new system that you link your page to, and it allows you a whole bunch of extra features and functions. The thing is, they’re all features designed for managing multiple pages, multiple ad managers and large teams of people.

Oh, Facebook leaves it open for everyone. They even say on the business manager page that it’s designed for businesses of all sizes. I just find that’s simple not true. After all, what can the business manager even do for you?

Features of Business Manager

Business manager is not without its benefits, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not suitable for most small businesses. Facebook claims it’s useful for everyone, and they even say it’s a more secure system for managing pages, but that’s a side effect of what it does.

The primary benefit to the business manager are the page roles. Normally, you only have a handful of roles you can assign to people running your page. Unfortunately, some key features require the top role, Admin, and it can be dangerous to give someone you don’t fully trust a top-level role in managing anything, on Facebook or otherwise.

That’s where the additional security comes in; additional manager roles that don’t have top level access. You can give people more responsibility without putting them in absolute control, so your one login is still the one with ultimate control.

That’s basically it. Every business manager feature comes down to some way of managing or segmenting teams and accounts under one heading. For instance, if you were the person behind managing Coca-Cola’s social media presence, business manager would be great. Instead of needing to use different accounts for Coke and Coke Australia and Diet Coke and Coke Zero, or swapping from page to page within the same account, you could just manage it all with business manager.

You would have one account that oversees everything, and some sub accounts to manage each business, and some accounts under each of those for managing specific tasks, like ads or page moderation. It’s all easily divisible.

Oh, and Facebook kind of made it mandatory for some types of accounts, specifically Gray accounts. Gray accounts are accounts that were created before Facebook made pages require a personal account. In other words, they’re accounts that manage pages but don’t have personal profiles attached. These accounts were automatically converted into business manager accounts.

The Problem with Playing Around

As marketers, we like to check out new tools when they come out. It’s good to see what works and what doesn’t, and if we don’t like something new, we can always drop it and go back to what we were using.

The problem with this outlook is one many people have encountered. When you upgrade your page to business manager, it’s converted into a business manager admin account. Now you play around with business manager, decide there’s not enough new in the system to be worth keeping with it, and decide to drop it. You search around, and you can’t find a way to remove your page.

The problem is that your page has become the primary page for the business manager account. Primary pages can’t be removed. Unfortunately, if this is your only page, you’re stuck. You have to either deal with business manager, or figure out a workaround. Thankfully, there is a good workaround, and I’ve replicated it here for you.

Step 1: Create a new page

You might as well do this through business manager. Click settings, pages, add new page, create a new page, and follow the prompts. It doesn’t matter what you name the page or what information you put in.

Step 2: Set it as the primary page

You can only do this from your primary business manager account. Click settings, info, and the pencil icon next to the new page. Click to change it to primary page, and save your changes.

Step 3: Remove your real page from the business manager

Click settings, pages, and the page you want to remove. Click the remove button, confirm your choice, and you’re done.

Once you’ve completed this, you’re left with your personal page and its associated business page, which you can swap between at will. You also have your business manager account with the associated primary page, which is the fake page you created as a dummy to replace your real page. You can delete the page or just ignore it, it won’t do any harm.

I actually recommend keeping the business manager page and just un-publishing it. It has no followers, it might as well not show up in search. That way, if and when Facebook makes a meaningful update to the business manager, you can log in to that page and look at how it works. That saves you the trouble of updating your current page to the business manager and then, if you don’t like the way it feels, removing it through this convoluted process again.

Why would anyone use business manager? Well, as I mentioned before, it’s a great app for large businesses that run multiple pages and multiple ad accounts. If you have a lot you have to keep track of, and you have numerous teams working on different aspects of the brand, then business manager is a great way to keep it all together. By assigning roles, organizing projects and segmenting pages, you can keep everything feeling like separate pages while organizing it all behind the scenes.

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DIY Facebook Marketing: How to Get Started

DIY Facebook Marketing: How to Get Started

One of the hottest trends in the last few years, marketing-wise, is growth hacking. The central concept of growth hacking is to accomplish your goals without spending money, or spending as little as possible. You spend time and energy instead of money, learning to do things yourself and using tools that have cheap or free price tags attached.

One of the core pillars of online marketing is advertising, and one of the best places to run advertising is Facebook. However, Facebook ads can be incredibly complex and time-consuming to run, which is why so many businesses turn to ad managers to do the work for them. I’m here to tell you, though, that you don’t need to pay someone else to do what you can do easily enough, once you’ve learned the ropes.

Step 1: Learn the Terminology

We marketers throw around a lot of terminology that can get pretty confusing. What’s CPC, and how is it different from PPC? What do we mean by lookalike audiences? What are objectives, and how are they different from goals?

Thankfully, you can find a pretty comprehensive glossary of ad terms on Facebook itself, in their help center. I don’t recommend reading through it like a guide, but keep it around as a reference document for when you read posts like this one, and some of the others I’ll link later.

For reference, CPC is your cost per click, the amount you spend each time a user clicks your ad. PPC is pay per click the ad style that requires payment per click. Lookalike audiences are groups of people who share demographics with your existing audience. Objectives I’ll cover in depth in step three, whereas goals are what you want to get out of your ads.

Step 2: Grab the Power Editor

Some people will tell you this is an advanced step, but I consider it all but essential for running any sort of ad campaign on Facebook. Power Editor is a Facebook-developed plugin for Google Chrome that gives you easy access to a lot of ads features you don’t normally see. They exist, at least most of them do, but they’re hard to find and tedious to use. Meanwhile, Power Editor puts them at your fingertips.

As I mentioned, it’s a plugin for Chrome, which means you need that particular web browser on whatever device you’re using. You can find the plugin itself here.

The reason I suggest you start off by grabbing the Power Editor is so you don’t have to learn it later. It’s easy to build up bad habits you then have to un-learn when you start using the Power Editor. It’s a little intimidating, but hell, you’re running a business; you should be prepared for a little intimidation.

Step 3: Learn Ad Placement and Objectives

Ad placements are simple; they’re the parts of Facebook where your ads display. You have news feed ads, you have sidebar ads, and you have mobile ads. Anything else is just a variation of one of those types, like a video ad. Sidebar ads tend to get more exposure but a lower click rate than news feed ads, but they’re also cheaper.

Ad objectives are a little more complex. When you create an ad, you choose an objective. Facebook then optimizes the viewing audience based on that objective, as well as the targeting you choose. Objectives also determine the look of the ad, and what actions cause you to be charged. The objectives are:

• Website clicks. This is standard PPC; pay to get users to click through to your landing page.


• Website conversions. You run ads that get people to go to your site, but you pay when they actually convert, rather than just when they click.


• Post engagement. This is how you convert a post into a news feed ad, and is similar to boosting a post.


• Page likes. This is a specific ad designed to get users to follow your Facebook page.


• App installs. Get users to install your app, typically more useful as a mobile ad than a desktop ad.


• App engagement. Try to get users to perform certain actions with your app.


• Offer claims. When you run an offer through Facebook, you can run this ad to get more exposure to it.


• Local awareness. This is a special type of ad for physical businesses, targeting geographically relevant users.


• Event responses. An ad that gets users to RSVP for your event.


• Video views. Ads that target a video you hosted on Facebook, with the goal of getting people to watch it.

Picking the right ad objective for your purpose is essential to optimizing your expenses.

Step 4: Get to Know Ad Targeting

Targeting on Facebook is the number one reason to use it over all other platforms. You might reach more people on more sites with Google, and you might have cheaper costs with a third party ad network, but you’ll never have as much data or as much control as you do with Facebook. I would list all of them, but it would triple the length of this post and your eyes would glaze over. Instead, I’ll just link you to an excellent post with some great targeting strategies for you to use.

The reason targeting is so robust on Facebook, by the way, is the sheer amount of data regular people give the site. Everything is harvested, from demographics and income/education levels to interests to the pages users follow and the actions they take. Almost all of it can be used by marketers.

Step 5: Learn the Basics of Ad Images

Ad images are important to the visibility and success of your ads. Ideally, they should relate to the topic being advertised, while also contrasting with Facebook’s blue and gray color scheme. Facebook has suggestions for the appropriate sizes for ads, but you can find exact specifications for each of them here.

After a quick overview, it’s time to play around in the ads manager and Power Editor. You aren’t at risk of running an expensive ad you can’t afford when you’re playing around; you have to jump through several hoops to make one active. Experiment, figure out how everything works, and create your first real ad.

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Tips to Market by Gender on Facebook Ads

Tips to Market by Gender on Facebook Ads

In the world of social justice, there has been an increasing movement towards gender fluidity and flexibility. The old dichotomy of male and female is on its way out. People identify as agender, androgynous, genderqueer, ftm or mtf, and anything else you can think up.

Facebook has become one of the first websites in the world to offer a whole host of these gender options as selectable identifiers in the profile of the average user. There are a lot of them – the gender options, I mean – totally up to 56 different options. Though, this is a little inaccurate; many of the options are very similar. Just take Cis for example; you have Cis, Cisgender, Cis man, Cis male, Cis woman, Cis female, Cisgender man, Cisgener male, Cisgender woman, and Cisgender female. If you’re the kind of person to whom the difference matters, it makes Facebook a very progressive site.

As if that wasn’t enough, Facebook even added in a custom form, for those Tumblrites who identify as cats or saran wrap or whatever other made-up genders they want to use to invalidate and dilute the legitimate social movement going on at the core of the changes.

By the way, don’t read the comments on the article I just linked. It’ll just make you angry, no matter what site of the movement you’re on.

That said, Facebook allows you to pick and choose who can see your gender options, which means they can’t be used for ad targeting. Any such private information is unavailable for targeting. Instead, Facebook goes by some other indicator. I’m honestly not sure what happens.

• On one hand, Facebook could go based on your previous gender before the options were added, so if you were Male before, but now you’re Agender, you’ll still count as Male for the purpose of ad targeting.


• On the other hand, it might go based on the male/female identification of your current gender setting. Agender might be targetable with both male and female ads, or maybe neither, while Intersex qualify for both.


• Another option might be going based on pronoun choice rather than gender selection. Despite this long list of gender options, you still choose your pronoun of choice between he, she, and they.

However it works, Facebook doesn’t allow marketers to target, say, specifically the MTF transgender users of the site, or specifically the non-binary members of the community.

Ad Targeting Specifics

All of that detail about gender fluidity and all the options Facebook gives you? As a marketer, forget it. It’s essentially entirely for the public face. It’s for social justice activists. Facebook placates them by allowing them to display whatever they want, while still limiting the information in the back end to the traditional male/female dichotomy.

This is a good thing for marketers for two reasons.

First, it prevents marketers from targeting custom genders, specifically genders that aren’t part of the “mainstream” gender movement. This goes along with Facebook’s rules against over-targeted ads that have too small audiences. There’s a famous story from last year about a guy using Facebook ads to narrowly target just one person; their roommate. You can read about the story here.

When used as a benign prank, it caused paranoia and could have ruined a man’s life. Imagine what could happen if Facebook allowed that to continue, and someone used it for harassment or for hate speech. It’s a good thing Facebook has blocked it by requiring a certain minimum number of users in an audience.

The other reason it’s a good thing for marketers is because it makes things that much simpler. It’s easy to split test ads between genders now. Imagine if you had to split test them amongst the dozens of display genders Facebook allows.

In the internal ads system, it’s literally a binary choice. If you get down to the API level, looking at code directly, you have a 1 and a 2 as options to specify. The 1 means male, and the 2 means female. 0 means nothing, nor does any other number. Leaving the field blank targets both genders indiscriminately.

Appropriately Using Facebook Ad Gender Targeting

So, as I mentioned, you can’t use ads to target people using non-standard genders. This puts a bit of a damper on any marketing excitement you may have had from Facebook implementing all of those options.

Don’t get me wrong; I think at some point it would be a good idea for Facebook to figure out the most popular and necessary gender options and add them to their marketing side. There are businesses out there that cater almost entirely to transgender or gender fluid crowds. Those businesses could benefit greatly from the ability to target their actual audience.

However, for now, you only have three choices. All genders, males, and females. When you’re targeting by gender, consider it just one small sub-refinement among many. You’re never going to run an ad targeted at males with no further targeting options. That would be insane, and it would waste your ad budget almost immediately.

Using audience genders appropriately comes down to knowing your audience. If you’re a clothing store selling female teenager clothing, chances are you’re going to want to target females. If you’re a brand whose audience mostly consists of men ages 35-50, you’ll want to use that age and gender targeting for your most precise ads.

There’s really nothing more to it. Learn your audience, target them appropriately, and don’t worry about the custom gender options until such time as Facebook decides to implement them in marketing.

The post Tips to Market by Gender on Facebook Ads appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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How to Respond to Facebook Profanity and Negativity

How to Respond to Facebook Profanity and Negativity

There are a lot of reasons why a user might be irate at a business, and they very often come out in frustrated text posts. Some people have no filter, and some just don’t want to hide their feelings. You might end up with negative messages posted in your reviews or on your wall, either as stand-alone posts or as replies to your posts. How can you manage these to maintain your reputation without censoring your users?

You have three options for how to deal with any negative comment, no matter who it comes from or where it’s posted. These are to respond to the comment, to ignore it, or to remove it.

Step 1: Make Sure You See the Comment

You can’t respond to a comment you haven’t seen, and when you let a negative or profanity-laced comment sit for days or weeks without response, it looks as though you neglect your page administration. You need to keep an eye out for every comment left on your page. You can do the same thing with Twitter’s listen service, as well as Google Alerts for non-Facebook posts.

Step 2: Categorize Comments

When you receive a comment, file it away. Is it positive, neutral, or negative? Is it worth a response, is it fine to ignore, or should it be addressed?

There are a few considerations to make when dealing with off-side comments. They’re worth mentioning, so I’ll cover them here.

Occasionally, you’ll see criticism and negativity directed at your business, but it’s posted on a small niche blog with very few readers. When that happens, don’t worry about responding to it, no matter how invalid their claims; all you do is draw attention to it.

Likewise, avoid responding to “criticism” that’s really just a disgruntled user airing their grievances in a public manner. As long as they aren’t disrupting your business, you can safely ignore them or remove their posts.

Step 3: Address the Issue

Any comment you’ve filed away to ignore, ignore. That’s it; easy. Done and done.

Any comment that requires removal should be removed or hidden as soon as possible. For posts made to your wall, this is easy enough; just delete the post. If the user is clearly posting spam or being profane for no reason, block the user as well.

To remove a post, click the V in the upper right corner of the post itself. You should be given the option of hiding or removing it. If it’s a comment on your post, when you hover over it, you’ll be able to click a delete button to get rid of it.

There’s one format where you won’t be able to remove an inflammatory comment, and that’s in the dedicated reviews section. There are two ways you can handle this. First, you can remove the reviews section altogether. This is a nuclear option for dealing with minor bad reviews, but if your reviews have been filled with spam, it’s a good idea to remove them.

The second option is to report the review to Facebook. It will likely sit there unaddressed for a while, but Facebook will eventually audit it and remove it because it’s clearly just meant to be spam.

Responding to Comments

What about those comments that aren’t worth deleting but do deserve a response?

For positive comments, this is a perfect time to thank your reviewer. Not only can you get a bit of goodwill; you can also start a conversation. Ask for clarification or ask if you can use their review as a testimonial on your website.

For negative comments, you need to act decisively. Respond to the review with a personal message. Something like “Hi, my name is ___. We’re looking into your issue right now, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. If you have any additional details or questions, please send them to <personal email>.”

What this does is gives a human voice and human attention to the problem. Users recognize a form letter when they see it. They know a form letter is just going to get impersonal service or a link to a knowledge base article with no real help. A personalized message, however, gives them a sense of being important, a sense of attention. It gives them an avenue to contact you.

It’s important to communicate from one human to another, and in order to do this, you need to give your customer service people a bit of leeway in their communications. The worst thing you can do is outsource your reputation management to an ESL call center.

Once you’ve made this response, of course, you have to actually take the initiative to investigate the issue. Figure out what the problem is and see how you can address it. You might even want to give the user something extra so they can feel better about the whole situation.

The primary power of social media is the ability to be a human behind your brand. That’s why if you apologize, you need to do it in a legitimate, thoughtful way. Something like this is a good example; they recognized their error, they corrected it, and they were up front about how it was a bad initial error to make.

Above all, avoid arguing. The worst social media snafus in history have all come from companies that capitalize on their slightly negative reputation by exploding in a frenzy of arguments and insults. It turns into a petty slapfight and that response is forever engrained on the face of the Internet. There’s nothing you can do about it after the fact; it’s there and you have to live with being the company that got in a petty fight over cupcakes, or whatever.

Don’t always try to take the customer service to a private channel, either. Offer one if one is desired; otherwise, display it publicly. This allows users a chance to see your customer service in action, which is beneficial all around.

The post How to Respond to Facebook Profanity and Negativity appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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