Social Never Sleeps: 4 Social Media Marketing Holiday Tips

 Oh, the holidays! Jingles, festivities, gift-giving, and….social media surfing. Yes, you heard it right. Social media buzz continues, if not increases, during the holidays. Consumers may be spending time on last-minute holiday party touches and finishing off gift-wrapping marathons, but what happens in between all this holiday activity? Newsfeed scrolling galore.

Eyeballs are eagerly consuming social media during those awkward family parties or while sitting next to the fire sipping eggnog. For that reason, you’ll want to hold off pausing your social media strategy during this time of the year and instead, keep the posts rolling for maximum engagement. And since most brick and mortar businesses take a holiday break, customers will turn to social timely responses.

 Keep in mind these key social media marketing factors when maintaining business communications during the holiday season:

Brand personality:

Your brand’s personality and voice should remain consistent, even during the holidays but that doesn’t mean your business can’t make festive tweaks. Company party? Show off some holiday prep photos or post a short behind-the-scenes video of employee celebrations and gift exchanges. If you get help with your social media, make sure your team has a grasp of your brand’s persona. This will help when dealing with difficult customer interactions.

Important information:

Post information that is relevant to your customers such as, holiday hours, giveaways, discounts, and events. It’s most likely your audience will visit your social media pages for quick access to information, especially for industries such as restaurant, retail, and e-commerce, so make sure all those details are up-to-date.

Engagement posts:

Entertain your audience with unique holiday posts. Create a holiday hashtag related to your area of businesses and encourage customers to converse with you about their holiday traditions. Pictures and videos are a great way to grab attention and easy to re-post. And the gift-giving season wouldn’t be complete without a giveaway, so post an original contest that showcases your best products, as well as thanks to your fans.

Timely responses:

Quick, accurate responses will put you at the forefront of social media. If your customers fail to reach you through your website, chances are social media will be their next stop. You don’t want to waste your customers’ valuable time, so answer their inquiries as soon as possible. The same goes for comments received on posts, reviews, wall posts, etc.; make sure to respond and spread the holiday cheer!

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How Mondelēz International keeps Oreo dynamic with fearless marketing

Fueled by creativity and enthusiasm, the successful launch of Oreo's Colorfilled campaign exemplifies how Mondelēz International is able to consistently remain ahead of the marketing curve.

From the beginning of November until Christmas of this year, Oreo lovers will be able to customize the packaging of their cookies and have personalized gift boxes delivered to their door. This limited-time offer is Oreo's most recent customization initiative that responds to parent company, Mondelēz International's, vision of growing its e-commerce revenue to $1 billion by 2020.

Many wonder how Oreo, a century old cookie brand, is able to continue delivering vivid experience to its consumers. This can be ascribed to the innovative mindset that parallels the fervor of a startup culture at Mondelēz International, dubbing the strategic approach to the iconic treat's campaign as "fearless marketing."

"We are scared every day - we don't look like Cisco, Facebook, or Google, and we are not Snapchat. So how can we identify the right talent and create the right culture to take advantage of the opportunity in front of us? Three years ago, [Mondelēz International's CMO] Dana Anderson challenged the organization to be fearless, and as a result, changed the way in which the company operated going forward," says Bonin Bough, chief media and e-commerce officer at Mondelēz International.

Customization enables a 100-year-old brand to be disruptive 

When discussing the concept of being "disruptive" within the context of marketing, the term typically refers to emerging tech companies - like Uber and Airbnb - that have acquired a reputation for being irresistible in their innovation, and therefore revolutionary. As a snack brand, Oreo aspires to be a disruptor in its category as well, according to Bough. Oreo Colorfilled is the first time Mondelēz International has ever allowed fans customize packaging, thus creating a personalized experience completely dictated by consumers, as they interact and engage with the iconic cookie brand.

Packages feature exclusive, black-and-white designs as the canvas, from graphic artists Jeremyville and Timothy Goodman. After selecting one of the two available templates, consumers can zoom in or out to select which area of the intricate prints they wish to add their own personal touches to.

Available on both desktop and mobile, users have the option to paint with a diverse color palate, and can further customize packages by accessorizing bags with a selection of original graphic stamps. There is also an option to compose an original message for each package.

Prior to Oreo Colorfilled, Mondelēz International had already established its reputation as the driving transformative force behind the brand-evolution of the century-old, iconic sweet treat.

On June 25, 2012, Oreo took a progressive stance by joining in the celebration of LGBT Pride Month, supporting the LGBT cause with a picture of a rainbow-colored, cream filled Oreo cookie on its social platforms. The images displayed on Facebook and Twitter were posted in conjunction with the caption, "Proudly support love!"

The post gained more than 90,000 shares and still has over 280,000 likes to date on Facebook alone. Such success led the Oreo team to seriously consider the value of real-time marketing on social. 

We’re all the same on the inside. #Pride pic.twitter.com/aqooO1kzj7 — Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) June 19, 2015

 After more than a year of experimentation with instantaneous, real-time marketing tactics, Oreo's "Dunk in the Dark" Tweet went live during the Super Bowl power outage. The timeliness of this post led to it going viral online, and this blackout Tweet is still considered the epitome of a social media coup by many in the industry today.

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

 Last year at South by Southwest, Oreo unveiled a Trending Vending Machine, which allowed attendees to customize cookies based on what was trending on Twitter.

"People waited for two and a half hours to get a cookie. This was when we learned that customization could be a huge platform for this brand," Bough says. "In order to make this happen, companies must collaborate with the best talent possible, both inside and outside of the organization. Also, they must create a culture that lets talent dream bigger," he adds.

Behind the scenes of Oreo Colorfilled

The launch of Oreo Colorfilled represents a culmination of Bough's conception of collaboration, thinking big, and culture. Initially, the idea for Colorfilled came from the company's e-commerce team, led by Cindy Chen, global head of e-commerce venture at Mondelēz International.

Two months ago, Lauren Fleischer, global brand manager of e-commerce at Mondelēz International, brought up Colorfilled at the company's monthly brainstorm meeting. It was expected that a project of this magnitude would take around two years to complete, so the majority of attendees wanted to shut down this plan, even referring to it as the product of "negative brainstorming."

"My co-workers had 400 reasons why this plan would not work; we didn't have enough time, we didn't have a plant, we didn't have a website, and we didn't have a box. But one colleague finally said to me, 'You guys can continue doing this negative brainstorming all day, or you can just leave and decide how to make this happen,'" Fleischer says.

Instead of repeatedly identifying and dwelling on the problem, in an effort to find solutions, Chen and Fleischer decided to bring a team of positive brainstormers together. This team consisted of Mondelēz's long-time agency partner, The Martin Agency, and MAYA Design, the tech design firm that was involved in the Trending Vending Machine at South by Southwest. They also collaborated with HP marketing executive, Doris Brown-Mcnally, to figure out the appropriate printing technologies required to execute this concept. After leasing a warehouse on a Monday, in two days, the Colorfilled team managed to convert the space into a functioning Oreo factory, opening its doors by Wednesday of the same week. 

Using Mondelēz International's proven formula for excellence, creativity and innovation were able to operate at the speed of culture, thus allowing the Colorfilled initiative to successfully come into fruition quickly, in spite of lingering doubts.

Oreo Colorfilled is small version of a start-up business that is part of a larger conglomerate. Such isolation provides employees a level of freedom that encourages the initiation of projects based on passion.

"I'm a start-up resident at Mondelēz International. You can manage a big political organization - that's an amazing skill -or you can operate something on your own," Fleischer notes.

The future

Oreo Colorfilled is just the start of the cookie brand's e-commerce journey. Going forward, the company will continue to encourage in-house marketers to be fearless in order to optimize mobile and social commerce by effectively incorporating personalization and real-time marketing into campaign strategy.

Today Oreo fans can customize the packing - tomorrow they may even be able to customize flavors on an individual basis.

"How can we take Oreo to the next level as a power brand? 30 percent of our consumers are interested in personalization," Chen says.

The company will also keep an eye on interface free shopping tools - such as the Amazon Dash Button - and achieve the same disruptive, revolutionary status through innovation within the snack industry.

Clearly, the Oreo brand is currently being driven by a team of smart cookies.  

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The No. 1 Facebook Post Mistake Every Brand Should Avoid

People check Facebook to see pictures of their friends and family, laugh at the latest memes and learn about breaking news.

The last thing they want—or expect—to see in their news feed is a blatant sales pitch from your brand.

Posts that scream “buy me, buy me” are jarring . . . especially when you’ve just enjoyed watching a video of your niece’s hockey game or the latest Grumpy Cat complaint.

For brands, the way to get the most value from Facebook is to view it as a social setting (which it obviously is) and behave in manner that will make you popular.

Consider the last networking event you attended. Who was the most interesting person you met? In all likelihood, it was someone who showed an interest in you by asking you questions about yourself, then shared some relevant information about your niche.

The most annoying were the ones who dominated the conversation, talked only about themselves and pushed their services on you without taking the time to understand if you were a fit.

Don’t be the most annoying brand on Facebook. Take the time to understand your customers and then provide them with useful information related to your business.

Engagement is key on Facebook

When people encounter overly promotional content in their news feeds, they quickly scroll right past it. No likes, no comments, no shares – no engagement whatsoever.

This kind of post doesn’t even register, so how can you expect it to help sell your product or service?

Even worse, it will actually hurt your brand over time. That’s because the less people engage with your posts, the less likely Facebook is to show your content in its news feed.

Many marketers and business owners still don’t understand this very important aspect of Facebook.

The platform doesn’t show all your posts to everyone who’s liked your page. Rather, it uses an algorithm based on user engagement to decide who sees what. The more someone interacts with your page by liking a post, sharing it or leaving a comment, the greater the chance he or she will see content from your brand in the future.

And the larger the number of people who actively see your brand and engage with it, the more frequently Facebook will share your posts with others, leading to even wider brand exposure. That’s why engagement is so important on Facebook (and other social media platforms, too).

So instead of using Facebook as a one-way broadcast mechanism to push your sales message, don’t make the #1Facebook post mistake many brands are making. Instead think about Facebook as a social environment and look for ways to start a quality conversation.

What should you post?

I admit it can be tough to engage on Facebook and your approach really depends on your brand and your prospective customers. Some brands fit more naturally with Facebook than others.

Consider an exotic tourist destination such as Australia. Its Facebook page attracts attention effortlessly through quality images of white sand beaches, cuddly koala bears and colourful larakeets. At present, the page has more than 6 million “likes,” and it’s not uncommon for hundreds of thousands of people to engage with individual posts.

But if you’re a digital marketing company selling to small businesses, your job on Facebook is a lot tougher.

Practical, business-oriented brands must work harder to make themselves appear inviting and generate engagement. You also need to strike a balance between being likeable and talking about your business.

As well, keep in mind that the cohttp://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/no-1-facebook-post-mistake-every-brand-should-avoidntent you share can’t just be your own. It’s important to include information from other sources, such as blogs and online news outlets. This content should relate to your brand and be of interest to your audience.

Look at your news feed as a customer would

If you plan to use a Facebook page to promote your brand, it’s essential to spend time on the platform familiarizing yourself with how people use it. Be sure to look at your news feed through your customers’ eyes. How interesting is it? When are you most likely to “like” something or leave a comment? What posts do you click on?

Then take that learning and start writing more interesting posts that aren’t all about you and your 2-for-1 sale.

Photo Credit: Facebook Mistakes/shutterstock

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THE TOP TENS

Ten ways to get your social media platforms into the holiday spirit.

Christmas trees and ornaments are already bringing festive cheer to the malls, Starbucks’ red coffee cups are everywhere and Black Friday is here.

IS YOUR COMPANY TAKING  ADVantage of the opportunity to market your products and services during the time of year when consumers typically spend the most? Are your company’s social media channels decked out to share in the season’s spirit? If your answers are ‘no,’ don’t worry – it’s not too late to join the festivities and produce unique and engaging content to drive traffic to your social media channels anD WEBSITE. 
Here are 10 simple tips to get your social media platforms into the holiday spirit:

1. Deck your halls. Before you begin sharing seasonal content, incorporate holiday-themed images into your profile pictures and backgrounds to show your business is ready for the festivities. This will signal that holiday posts, images and videos can be expected over the next few weeks.

2. Share some tips. You can share general advice, but if your business can fill a specific niche, offer up unique tips. For example, you can highlight your restaurant’s holiday menus by providing a recipe, a short video clip or photo series of how to elevate stuffing and brussel sprouts.

3. Seasonal hashtags. Be sure to include holiday-trending hashtags to be part of the larger conversation. You can also create and include a unique company-related hashtag that could be utilized by others such as #CompanyNameXmas,#CompanyNameHolidays, or #CompanyNameGifts.

4. Design a competition. Set up a holiday-themed competition on your platforms as a way to engage your audiences and share more seasonal content. For example, encourage followers to post their best themed photo, video, or meme, which will add to the content your company is already producing. Increase participation by offering an incentive such as a promotion or a prize for the winner(s). If it were a competition seeking the most likes or shares, that would encourage participants to share your social media profiles.

5. Holiday traition discussions. Similar to a competition, initiate discussions and posts about people’s favourite holiday traditions as a way to create dialogue between your company and potential customers. This could include such topics as “favourite childhood holiday memory,” “best way to cook a turkey,” “gift ideas for the person who has everything” and “most overplayed holiday song”.

6. Daily prize or promotion. A free daily prize or promo giveaway will entice people to check out (and potentially share) your social media profiles. For example, you could randomly select a winner from new likes, shares or retweets (RTs)  for each of the 12 days of Christmas or do a countdown to New Year’s to stretch out the contest.

7. Employee features. Your employees may have deep networks on multiple platforms. Add a more personal touch by featuring your employees in your content, and they will likely share with their networks something in which they are featured. Have them share their tips, pictures or reasons why they love the holidays. This offers people a peek inside your company and makes it a little easier for people to relate to your business as being made up of people as opposed to a faceless brand.

8. Virtual tour. Stores will be decked out in the most festive holiday decorations. And often employees decorate their office space as part of the holidays. Share these images on your social media channels to develop a connection with potential customers. Challenge your audiences or even other businesses to share how they have added to the holiday cheer at work.

9. Social media ads. Since you have incorporated holiday themes in your social media content, apply the same approach to the ads you may utilize on these platforms. This way, you can highlight a holiday special or promotion and attract individuals to your website or physical business.

10. Remember your audience. You may be operating a number of social media platforms. If you’re not doing it already, remember to tailor your content by platform to reflect the audience and demographics on those channels. While a potential post with a link and several hashtags may work on Twitter, it may be more effective as an infographic on LinkedIn or as copy and a picture on Facebook. While you can repurpose content, it’s much more effective if you don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year to raise awareness for your company’s brand and to inject some creative and lighthearted content into marketing campaigns.

Jennifer Osborne is a digital marketing expert. She is the president of Search Engine People Inc. (SEP), Canada’s largest digital marketing firm, which has been on the PROFIT 100 ranking of Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies for the past five consecutive years and named one of PROFIT Magazine’s 50 Fastest Growing Companies in the Greater Toronto Area. Jennifer has been named as one of Canada’s top women entrepreneurs.

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Study says social-media analyses are off target

Rigorous methodologies, sophisticated analytic engines can still be wrong if no one corrects for flaws in data fed to them.

The things people say on Twitter or share on Facebook are pretty trivial individually.

When you collect the 5 billion or so items posted to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks every dayinto one massive database, those bits of individual drivel combine into a massive pointillist masterpiece that is already changing the way governments and corporationsrelate to individual humans, allowing marketers to tailor products more precisely to the customer preferences (and target spam campaigns more effectively) with up to the minute insight into the thinking of their constituents.

Deep analysis of social-network data has changed online marketing so quickly that senior-level marketing executives are still struggling to come to grips with their new power to analyze customers, according to the CMO Council that represents them.

Which is a shame, because the picture all those petabytes of badly spellchecked musings provide of the thoughts or preferences of actual customers is mostly wrong, according to a study published in today's issue of the journal Science.

The problem isn't with the data; the problem is with the way data is presented and analyzed, according to the article's authors, Derek Ruths of McGill University and Jurgen Pfeffer of Carnegie Mellon.

Social-media datasets often munge together all those personal revelations into a big picture without correcting for things that make a big difference in their accuracy – like the demographic differences between social network populations, the type of information usually posted on each the number of bots and spammers pretending to be human users and even the effect of the site design on the tone of the content posted.

Facebook, which is the single largest contributor to the social-network-data universe, has a Like button but not a Dislike button, which makes it harder to detect a negative reaction to a particular piece of data, the two argue.

Specifically:

Facebook, which is used by about 71 percent of Americans skews significantly female, young and (relatively) lower income, according to December, 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center. Seventy-six percent of women polled use Facebook compared to 66 percent of men; 84 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 use Facebook, as did 76 percent of those with incomes under $50,000 per year.

Twitter is almost gender balanced, but twice as many African-American respondents said they Tweet than either white or Latino, and its user numbers skew far more heavily toward those in the 18-29-year-old age group (31 percent) than Facebook.

Instagram is 28 percent more female than male, but is far less skewed than Pinterest, which attracts five times more women than men.

LinkedIn is more male than female (24 percent to 19 percent) and more black than white but skews drastically toward the middle ages (30 years old to 64 years old), college-educated and upper income (38 percent make $75,000 per year or more).

Researchers and service firms that collect, clean and sell social-media data sets often slot users into easy-to-identify groups according to age, income and other variables, which make the data look more consistent than the users they came from, according to Ruths and Pfeffer.

Even worse are reports that use smoothed-over data with analytics that are a little too smug to infer things like a user's political affiliation.

Even using analysis methods that are "sound and often methodologically novel," Ruths and a co-author wrote in an earlier paper, "reported accuracies have been systematically overoptimistic due to the way in which the validation datasets have been collected."

The real accuracy levels for political affiliation are closer to 65 percent than the oft-reported 90- percent Ruths and Pfeffer wrote.

Far from being unfixable, however, miscalculations in social-media analyses can already be fixed using methods developed to fix similar problems in studies in epidemiology, statistics and machine learning.

"The common thread in all these issues is the need for researchers to be more acutely aware of what they're actually analyzing when working with social media data," according to Ruth, who compared social-media mis-analysis to the flaw in survey methodology that produced the "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline from the 1948 Presidential election. That survey, which was done by telephone, drastically underestimated the number of Truman supporters, many of whom, in the days before telephones became ubiquitous even in rural areas, didn't have phones.

"We’re poised at a similar technological inflection point. By tackling the issues we face, we’ll be able to realize the tremendous potential for good promised by social media-based research," Ruths said in a McGill press release about the paper's publication.

Fortunately for marketers hoping to produce social-media analyses with results that won't send their companies racing off in very close to the right direction, there are already projects underway to fix social media's identity problem.

In October Twitter announced it was giving the MIT Media a $10 million grant and the promise of a real-time public feed of Twitter data to create analytical tools that would bring deeper, more accurate insights into the meaning of billions of Tweets.

The Social Media Research Group at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia have actually come out with a Web-based platform with algorithms specifically designed to provide an "academically rigorous" analysis of social-network data.

The online service, which is available to a few early testers but is otherwise still under development, was announced Nov. 11.

"We want to move the analytics discussion beyond counts such as likes, favorites and retweets into prompting action based on real-time content and metrics placed in national and industry contexts," according to an announcement quoting co-developer Darryl Woodford, a research fellow at the university.

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7 Ways You Should Use Social Media in Your Online Marketing Toolkit

Online marketing has come a long way since the inception of the Internet. Through the introductions of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, plenty of opportunities have presented themselves for startups to increase visibility and land conversions.

Any business can profit from using social media. Even taking time to do a couple of brief social media posts or updates a day can have a positive impact and build market awareness.

Because smaller businesses often target niche audiences, they may even benefit more than companies that have massive marketing budgets. You can connect easily and network organically from personal/professional accounts without having the kind of corporate accounts that may get lost in the shuffle.

How to balance your social media strategy

It only takes one hit to rocket a brand to Internet stardom, which will expand brand awareness and drive traffic. That means that with the right content, literally anyone can hit it big at the right time.

Unfortunately, as quickly as it comes, the exposure can fade. And the science that supports the creation of the kind of content that will go viral at any given time is inexact and constantly evolving.

Obviously, one of the most prominent uses for social media marketing is as a tool to promote sales or discounts, but thinking outside the box can promote the longer-term goals of increasing media exposure and conversion rates.

Think about implementing these social media concepts to connect more deeply with your market:

1. Target a niche in the market to create a focused following. Identify and pursue a demographic to increase the likelihood of connecting with site visitors. A business can never please its entire market. But by identifying a problem in a subsection of the market, you can provide unique solutions for that problem, and inspire brand trust and higher conversion rates.
2. Offer opt-in choices for additional connectivity. Opt-in availability that’s well managed will encourage users who find content intriguing to agree to receive a newsletter or updates. It’s even better if a company offers to target the kind of information it sends to users.
   At that point, opt-out functionality is vital. If opt-in can be quickly promotional, an opt-out system that doesn’t work can be at least as detrimental, and likely more. Users should feel confident they have full control over the content that’s arriving in their email inbox. Receiving emails after having unsubscribed is extremely irritating and can lead to company blacklisting, which will make future email campaigns more difficult.
3. Provide content rich in relevancy and usefulness. It’s not enough to have social media and blogs and a well-designed website. Your business should also have content that readers care about. Finding a way to connect with the audience first can provide some clues about how to nudge them toward a brand concept.
   Sometimes the most successful social media content takes two different demographics or concepts, finds the connecting link between them, and capitalizes on that. Having a unique way to reach a wider target market -- in a meaningful way -- can give your company a competitive edge.
4. Don’t overload followers with posts. Less can often be more. Depending on the content provided on a blog or other site, several short posts may sometimes be more effective; or just a few longer posts that really delve into an issue may be the ticket.
   Once again, knowing your audience will direct you to the right answers here. It may also be helpful to know what’s trending online so the information you provide on your site is timely.
5. Funnel traffic to your blog or website. There are several different ways to drive traffic to your company’s sites, the easiest of which is to go viral. Unfortunately, going viral is not something you can accomplish with an exact science; there’s no guarantee that any campaign will hit the jackpot.
   Another way to drive traffic involves having a trusted web host that has the support, uptime, and speed level your company requires.
6. Get creative with ways to divert traffic from social media sites to your professional website or blog. Visual messages with hyperlinks that draw traffic to your site can be extremely successful in promoting conversion rates.
7. Converse with your followers. Any comments on a firm’s website, blog, or social media site should be addressed in a timely and appropriate manner. According to Jessica Ann, a blogger atFatCow, it’s important to “be more social, less ‘media.’”

Retweeting others’ comments and responding to Facebook or blog posts will humanize your company and build trust among users. It’s all about focusing on what the followers -- your potential clients -- care about and addressing those issues.

Increasing sales effectively through social media strategy requires a mixture of these and other online marketing concepts. Determining the right tools for the job and maintaining the effort over time has been statistically shown to have a direct and positive correlation with building revenue.

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Facebook Ad Campaign Changes: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you use Facebook ads to boost your business?

Are you confused by the latest changes?

Recent changes made to Facebook’s ad campaign structure can affect how you set up and test your ads.

In this article you’ll discover how to set up a Facebook ad campaign in the new structure.

Campaign Structure Changes

The biggest change is that budget, schedule, bidding, targeting and placement of your ads are all configured at the ad set level. Only the images, copy, call-to-action button and Facebook page are configured at the ad level.

So if you are split testing your ads and changing a variety of things, you may need to set up multiple ad sets, as well as multiple campaigns.

Here are some examples of when you need a new campaign, new ad set or just a new ad for the different things you might split test.

Split testing that requires a new campaign:

• Different website landing pages
• Different types of ads (i.e., promoted post vs. website conversion)

Split testing that requires a new ad set:

• Different bidding models
• Different targeting

• Ads that you want to run automatically on a particular individual schedule (i.e., one ad runs on Sunday and one ad runs on Monday—to turn these on automatically individually, they both need their own ad set)

Split testing that only requires new ads:

• Different image
• Different copy
• Different call-to-action buttons
• Using a different Facebook page for website clicks or website conversion ads

Most of the other changes are more cosmetic in the layout. Facebook has simplified the setup so it’s more aligned with the new structure. They have broken the setup into three steps:

Step 1: Create your campaign
Step 2: Create your ad set
Step 3: Create your ad

Notice that you can name your campaign and ad set at the end of the step. Give them a meaningful name to easily see which ads are doing well in the Reports area.

To set up an ad in the new Facebook ad structure, follow these steps after you go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/.

#1: Choose the Objective

This will be the objective of the campaign. Notice the language has changed a bit on the selections here.

Notably, the Page Post Engagement selection has been changed to Boost Your Posts. This may be confusing for people who are more used to the promoted posts vs. boosted posts language.

Choosing your objective sets the objective at the campaign level.

The benefit of setting up the Boost Your Post ad here within the Ads Manager is that you can configure the ad to boost the post to only your fans, rather than boosting to People who Like your Page and their Friends when you use the Boost Post option directly on your Facebook page.

#2: Enter Objective Details

After choosing an objective, you make other selections related to your objective such as entering a website address, selecting a conversion pixel or selecting which event to promote.

Add the details to your objective.

In this example, I chose to promote conversions on my website and had to select the corresponding active website conversion pixel.

#3: Name the Campaign

Once you click Continue after entering the objective details, you can name your campaign. Facebook gives it a name by default based on the objectives, but you can change the name to something meaningful to you.

Name your campaign.

#4: Design the Ad Set

Next, you set up the targeting, bidding and budget for your ad set. While the order of the setup has changed to be more in line with the flow of the new structure, the targeting has not changed.

Remember that the ads below the ad set will all share the same bidding model and budget.

Facebook does optimize the ads below the ad sets so the better-performing ads get more of the budget. Be aware that one of your ads may be shown less often. You can manually control the ads below the ad set by turning them on and off as you require.

The targeting and pricing are set up at the ad set level.

#5: Design the Ad

The last step is to design your ad.

If you’re only going to change the ad image for split testing, you can add multiple images here and multiple ads will be created with the different images. Then Facebook will split test them and optimize the campaign to show the best-performing ad more often.

Design your ad.

If you are changing the text or the call-to-action button for split testing, you can easilycreate a similar ad after the first one has been created.

Click Create Similar Ad to use the same information from the ad you created and then edit what you need to change.

And if you need to adjust the bidding model or targeting for an ad set, you can click Change Ad Set after you’ve created the similar ad.

Change the ad set after creating a similar ad to adjust the bidding or targeting in the new ad.

You can still edit the ad after it has been created. Click Edit next to the Creative area or if you need to adjust anything in the ad set, click the wheel and then edit.

Click the wheel to see the ad set information and you can edit it from there.

Additional Tips and Pointers

Every ad account is limited to 1,000 campaigns, 1,000 ad sets and 5,000 ads. If you hit the limit, you can delete campaigns, ad sets and ads. Each ad set is limited to no more than 50 non-deleted ads.

Make sure you know when Facebook is optimizing your ads for you and when you need to watch your ad optimization.

For example, the two ads below are in the same ad set, but they were created before the migration so they have different target audiences. You can see that the ad with a worse cost per like was taking more of the budget for the day. In an instance like this, you need to manually turn off the ad that’s performing worse.

Watch your cost per conversion and turn off ads that are performing worse.

In the new ad sets, Facebook is supposed to optimize so that the ad with the better conversion gets more of the budget, but I suggest watching those stats to see if you agree. I created a Campaign with two different images in the Ad sets and one ad did not show at all while the other ad got the entire budget.

Watch the optimization between your ads.

Wrapping Up

The new setup flow for campaigns, ad sets and ads does seem to be easier to understand. As marketers, we need to embrace the change, while finding ways to keep our costs low, such as split testing and optimizing our budget to fit our goals.

If you have current ads, you can run them as they’ve been set up, but all ads will be migrated to the new structure sometime after January 2015. Any new ads you set up will use the new structure.

You can read more about the new campaign structure on the Facebook for Business site.
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