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.

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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.

The post DIY Facebook Marketing: How to Get Started appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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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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A List of Facebook’s Recent Algorithm Changes

A List of Facebook’s Recent Algorithm Changes

To some marketers, Facebook is almost as important as Google. Nothing quite scratches the big G’s golden throne, but a lesser, slightly smaller silver throne is perfectly fine for another one of the largest corporations in the world.

When Google makes an algorithm change, they announce it months in advance and let webmasters do what they can to minimize the damage it might cause. When Facebook makes an update, sometimes they announce it, sometimes they don’t. Then again, a lot of Facebook’s changes aren’t dramatically important to many page owners. After all, how negatively will you be affected when Facebook demotes hoax links? Probably nothing at all will happen.

That’s the key to understanding Facebook updates. A majority of them are geared towards making the news feed better for individual users. They hardly have an effect on brands. Of course, some are quite the opposite, dramatically affecting brands, so you need to stay ahead of them.

For future reference, once this document falls out of date, you can check Facebook’s newsroom for posts about the most recent events and updates.

April 2015 – Friends Given Priority

This update was announced April 21 and affects businesses in a negative way. Facebook listened to feedback from users and made a few changes.

The first change affects virtually no one. For personal accounts that have very few friends and followed pages, Facebook formerly would just run out of content to display, even if those friends had posted more often. With this change, Facebook will show more posts for those low-connection users.

The second and more important change is increasing the priority of friend posts over brand posts. Feedback indicated that personal users didn’t like missing messages from their friends, particularly when brand posts and ads filled their feeds. Facebook, thus, demotes brand posts and promotes friend posts.

The third change is the demotion or removal, depending on scale, of news feed stories where a friend sees that their friend commented on a post. These were largely uninteresting, because Facebook wouldn’t point out the precise comment, and sometimes wouldn’t allow you to interact with the post your friend commented on. This hurts brands because the “friend liked this post” notification is the core of viral reach.

January 2015 – Demoting Hoaxes

Hoax posts typically found it very easy to go viral, primarily because people tend to believe things from their friends and don’t use common sense or fact check. Hoaxes include posts like “X has died” to perpetuate a celebrity death hoax, as well as various “like and share this post to win X expensive item,” typically a car, expensive apparel, or other items of high value.

Of course, Facebook doesn’t have a common sense algorithm. It has to determine that a post is false based on reports from users. This makes the “report post” feature a little more powerful, as users can report a post as false and help cease its circulation.

The only brands that could potentially be affected by this change are satire brands like the Onion, though Facebook found that when the post was clearly satire or comedy, the post wasn’t reported. Only when the post was a scam or potentially malicious did users report it.

January 2015 – Promotional Posts Demoted

This update is one of the most major changes in the last year, and as such it was actually announced in mid November of 2014.

Most of the reason this update made as big a stir as it did was the misunderstanding of what it meant. Too many reporters took the title and ran with it, without reading the greater context of the post.

Facebook is demoting overly promotional posts, which directly affects and hurts brands that make such posts. This is true. The context, however, is what they consider an overly promotional post. Specifically, they are demoting any post that exists solely to push an app or a product sale, any post that pushes a sweepstakes or promotion without context, and any post that reuses the same content from your ads. You can see examples of each in the link above.

September 2014 – A Boost to Trending Topics

In this update, Facebook realized that people like to see trending topics, particularly the things their friends had to say about those topics. To promote this, Facebook began to promote trending content, including posts about trends made by brands.

This is a good opportunity for brands to adjust their posting strategy to include current events and trending stories on a day to day basis. Capitalize on knowing global trends by posting about them, and you’ll see a wider reach and a higher position in the news feed.

To tie in with this, Facebook has begun to take into account how recent likes and comments are on a post, in order to promote them properly. A post that gains likes immediately but tapers off after a few hours will see less impact from a future burst of likes. Meanwhile, a post that grows more engaged and more relevant by the hour will see more benefit from the ongoing engagement.

August 2014 – Stop Using Clickbait, Seriously

For quite a while, Facebook has been slowly demoting the relevance of clickbait headlines, the kind that made sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed as prominent as they are. Facebook found that users often marked such headlines as spam or as content they didn’t want to see. As such, articles with common clickbait titles – “You won’t BELIEVE what happens next!” – end up demoted.

The primary takeaway for this update is to make sure your post details what’s in the link. Users want to know if it’s worth watching, and clickbait specifically leaves out the information you need to make that conclusion. Initially, this got people to click through to see. These days, they don’t bother, and the news feed changes reflect that.

There you have it; a look at the past updates that affect pages for nearly a year. Anything older than this is old news; anything newer hasn’t happened yet. Be sure to check back later for posts from us about new updates and trends you need to watch.

The post A List of Facebook’s Recent Algorithm Changes appeared first on Boostlikes.com.

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