Your Guide to Social Media Targeting Via Sprout

Your Guide to Social Media Targeting Via Sprout

These days, everyone is a publisher. Brands, consumers, businesses and agencies alike are creating digital content at a speed that far outpaces our ability to consume these messages. As Steve Rubel, Chief Content Strategist at Edelman, puts it: “The digital content ecosystem, I’ve come to believe, is like the night sky. There are thousands of stars all vying for our attention. Yet few or none truly stand out.”

Many attempt to solve this problem strictly with creativity. While creativity helps, it turns out that another way to win attention in noisy social media feeds is by being highly relevant . And with more and more content filling our various feeds, it’s becoming increasingly important that you get your posts in front of the right segments of your overall audience. As such, audience targeting has become a necessary and effective component of a successful social media publishing strategy.

Of course, when paying to promote a piece of content, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn provide extremely robust targeting capabilities that enable publishers to refine their intended audience through a bevy of demographic, user type and interest-level categories. However, social media targeting is not a strategy that should be solely supported by advertising dollars .

Luckily, most social networks allow publishers to apply some level of targeting or custom visibility to organic posts. Setting custom visibility through targeting criteria available via Sprout Social can increase engagement rates and provide a more relevant experience by delivering content that’s tailored specifically to certain segments of your audience.

For ease of use, click on any of the links below to jump to the platform you wish to explore, and learn how Sprout can help you reach the right audience:

• Facebook Audience Targeting


• LinkedIn Audience Targeting


• Google+ Audience Targeting


• Twitter Audience Targeting

Accessing Audience Targeting From Compose

Sprout’s publishing tools make it easier than ever to schedule, queue and post messages to multiple networks simultaneously and leverage unique social media targeting options for each individual network—all from a single intuitive Compose window.

This is really powerful. Not only does Compose centralize your social media publishing efforts, saving you time and ensuring a consistent voice across networks, but it also allows you to deliver the most relevant messages to targeted segments of your communities on each network .

To access the Audience Targeting options, simply click the globe icon in the lower left corner of the Compose window. The menu will intelligently populate with only the networks that correspond to the profiles to which you have selected to publish.

Sprout’s Audience Targeting capabilities are available to all Sprout users in all plan types, from Deluxe to Enterprise. If publishing targeted messages is part of your social media publishing strategy, no matter the size of your team or the audience you’re trying to reach, Sprout can help you achieve your goals.

Facebook Audience Targeting

The Facebook News Feed has become a crowded space. With the ever-changing Edgerank algorithm, ensuring a healthy reach on your organic posts can feel like a constant battle. While it may seem counterintuitive, one effective method for maximizing the organic reach of your posts is to target them to a smaller, more relevant segment of your audience.

While targeting by user type or interest-based criteria can be effective in creating and testing Facebook ads, by the nature of these inputs, there is still a possibility that you are introducing some subjectivity into your refinements. To that end, Sprout’s Facebook Audience Targeting criteria focus on two of the most objective, clear-cut audience attributes: language and location.

From Sprout, Facebook targeting can be applied to posts based on the following criteria:

• Country


• State/Province


• City


• Language

When selecting any of the above, you can simply start typing the name of the desired target, and Sprout’s look-ahead smart search will refine the options in the dropdown menu, making it easy to find what you need.

The following are a few scenarios where language and location targeting can be applied:

• Posting regional content, such as location-specific promotions or events


• A/B testing the popularity of a product in specific locations


• Publishing translated posts to targeted subsets of a global audience

Keep in mind that language and location targeting will apply to the visibility of your Facebook posts across all of Facebook. This means that a Facebook fan who falls into the targeted segment for a specific post will be able to view that post in their News Feed, via Facebook search and while visiting your Page directly.

LinkedIn Audience Targeting

LinkedIn has come a long way from being a repository of digital resumes. Today, LinkedIn represents a thriving community of professionals looking to make deeper connections with their peers; it also serves as a robust publishing platform with vast amounts of content.

As the overall LinkedIn community has grown—now, more than 364 million members across 200 countries—it has become increasingly important to ensure that your content reaches the right people at the right time. Publishing targeted updates is an effective way to communicate with your LinkedIn followers in a more relevant and personal way.

From Sprout, LinkedIn targeting can be applied to posts based on the following criteria:

• Company size


• Industries


• Function


• Seniority


• Continents


• Countries


• State/province


• City

Applying audience targeting using the criteria outlined above will enable you to segment your LinkedIn followers and deliver content that is tailored specifically to subsets of your overall follower base. For example:

• Use seniority or job function targeting to share a job posting with relevant candidates.


• Share regionally specific company news or information about local industry events, using geography and industry targeting.

Download our free guide, “LinkedIn Targeting: Delivering Relevant Content to the Right People,” for actionable insights on how to best align your audience targeting strategy with your overall business objectives.

Google+ Audience Targeting

While Google+ may not provide the same level of demographic or interest-based targeting as Facebook or LinkedIn, it does enable you to create your own custom audience segments in the form of Circles. When leveraged properly, Circles offer a unique and powerful opportunity for executing targeted social media publishing.

Within Sprout, Audience Targeting for Google+ publishing enables you to set the visibility of your posts to include any individual or combination of the default post options (Public, Your Circles, Extended Circles) plus any custom Circles which you create.

However, keep in mind that when posting to multiple Google+ Pages at the same time, your Audience Targeting will be limited to the default options of:

• Public


• Your Circles


• Extended Circles

Twitter Audience Targeting

The Twitter community is very much a global one, and in many ways, the platform has been central to breaking down barriers and opening up the free flow of communication—even across borders. At the same time, certain scenarios call for more targeted messaging, such as publishing regionally relevant content. Geotargeting organic Tweets can be leveraged to create better experiences for local audiences .

From Sprout, Twitter targeting can be applied to Tweets based on the following criteria:

• Country

A few examples of effective Twitter geotargeting by country include:

• A multinational business maintains individual Twitter handles for each market in which it operates; however, it recognizes that the main corporate handle has the largest follower base. This business can leverage geotargeted Tweets from the corporate handle to reach local audiences that may not follow the regional handles.


• A global brand produces and shares content in several different languages from its main brand Twitter handle. To avoid alienating followers to which localized content may be irrelevant, the brand uses geotargeted Tweets to reach native speakers.

It’s important to note that any Tweet published with geotargeting applied will only be visible to users in that country—whether they are viewing their home feed or visiting the Twitter account’s page directly.

Bonus: Reach a Targeted Audience Through Advocates

There’s no doubt that leveraging audience targeting is an effective way to refine your social media publishing strategy. That said, it’s certainly not the only way to ensure that your messages are organically reaching the right audience. A carefully crafted employee advocacy program enables you to tap into a unique and powerful targeted community: your employees and their trusted networks. Similar to audience targeting, employee advocacy represents another strategy to reach a highly relevant audience and, when executed effectively, can have a meaningful impact on the overall spread of your brand’s content.

The post Your Guide to Social Media Targeting Via Sprout appeared first on Sprout Social.

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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.

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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.

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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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