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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Twitter Introduces Twitter Offers: This Week in Social Media

Twitter Introduces Twitter Offers: “This feature, Twitter Offers, enables advertisers to create card-linked promotions and share them directly with Twitter users.”

“With Twitter Offers, advertisers will be able to attribute redemptions directly to their campaigns on Twitter, so that they can effectively measure the ROI from their promotions, even when redemption happens offline.”

Vine Gives You Push Notifications From Your Favorite Accounts: “Now, you can select your favorite accounts to be sure you see Vines from them.”

“Simply tap the star in the top right corner of a user’s profile to make them a favorite.”

Here’s some social media news worth following:

Facebook Updating Terms and Policies: These updates will take effect on January 1, 2015. They aim to help you “understand how Facebook works and how to control your information.”

Twitter Experiments With Tweet Analytics: According to The Verge, “a new tool in Twitter’s official mobile app lets users see a variety of metrics about their tweets, but not everyone has access to it, and it’s not clear whether it’ll ever roll out to the entire user base.”

Amazon Launches Social Buying for Amazon Webstore: “Drive direct sales from social media news feeds with shareable, shoppable posts of your Amazon Webstore products.”

Here’s a cool social media tool worth checking out:

Livefyre Studio: “The world’s first real-time content marketing and engagement platform.”

Here are some recent studies worth noting:

How Tweets Drive Sales: New Holiday Shopping Research: The latest holiday research study from Twitter and the research firm DB5 found that 54% of Twitter users say promotions found on Twitter motivate them to buy. The same number of people also checked Twitter while shopping in retail stores. Twitter users tend to shop earlier for the holidays (34%) and enjoy the experience (81%) more than non-users. Twitter users also spend more with 24% planning to spend $1,000 or more this holiday season compared to only 10% of non-users.

How Identity Influences Online Content Sharing [Infographic]: Boutique agency Fractl surveyed 1,000 social media users to discover what aspects of their identity motivated their content sharing online. Overall, personal identity ranked as the third most important motivation for sharing content, after wanting to entertain (44%) and wanting to educate (25%). Eighty-four percent of respondents ranked relational identity (i.e., being a good friend or partner) as an important reason why they share content online. Sixty-three percent ranked personal identity (personal values and morals) as an important factor. The study also found that women expect more engagement from their friends and followers, but men share content more frequently.

CEB/Radius Study Reveals B2B Marketers Not Using Social Media’s Full Potential: Findings from a new survey of CEB Research on behalf of Radius, Inc. show over 80% of small- and medium-sized business (SMBs) owners primarily use social media to market their own products or services, but not to interact with suppliers. When SMB owners do interact with suppliers, it’s usually limited to easy-to-access deals and promotional offers, but there is potential for so much more. Among SMB owners that have seen social media messages from their suppliers, almost 40% report feeling more positive about the supplier’s brand. This study is part of a larger report titled Social Media 2014 Update: Three Use Cases for Marketing to Small Business Owners, conducted in June 2014.

HubSpot’s Sixth Annual Report on Inbound Marketing and Selling: The 2014 State of Inbound Marketing, HubSpot’s recent survey of over 3,500 marketing and sales professionals, found the number of marketers practicing inbound marketing rose to 85% this year from 60% last year. While ROI tops marketing challenges, the #1 marketing priority seems to be lead generation (24%) followed by lead conversion (21%). The study also found marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI.

STUDY: Average Fortune 100 Brand Has 320 Social Media Accounts: New study from security-as-a-service provider Proofpoint found that the average Fortune 100brand has 320 social media accounts, up 80% over the past three years. Brand-generated content accounts for less than 7% of content shared on those social media channels, yet companies can still be held liable for the other 93%, including user-generated or partner content. Each company uses an average of 12 distinct publishing tools and applications to manage their social media channels. However, only 30% of corporate social publishing is conducted through enterprise social publishing and relationship management tools.

7 in 10 Enterprise CEOs Believe They Are Wasting Money on Marketing Initiatives: A Forbes Insights study, conducted in association with Rocket Fuel and Spencer Stuart, found that 69% (36% agree; 33% strongly agree) of the 296 global senior executives surveyed believe their company wastes money on marketing initiatives, a sentiment shared by only 34% of CMOs (22% agree;12% strongly agree). The study also found that the CMO/CEO disconnect is equally as large when measuring attitudes about customer knowledge. The study authors suggest better data might be the remedy, pointing to the results indicating that executives who understand big data are more likely to be able to drive insights and avoid waste.

Transera and Harris Poll Survey Reveals the American Consumer’s Perspective on Big Data and the Customer Experience: New survey results from Harris Poll and data analytics company Transera Inc. show that a majority (67%) of American consumers are willing to give companies access to their personal information in exchange for better service or products. However, that’s primarily limited to very basic information like their name (53%), demographic (33%) and contact information (34%). Half of those surveyed say they trust social media companies the least among any other industry to use their data to provide a better customer experience.

Here’s more social content worth noting:

The Rise of Podcasts as Business Education: “It talks about why podcasting is on the rise among businesspeople.”

The Rise of Podcasts as Business Education. Attribution to MarketingPodcasts.com.

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Social Media Saturday: Facebook's Unbundling Worked, Tumblr and Pinterest Grow Fastest, and Could Yik Yak Be the Next Snapchat?

This week in social media was all about mobile growth and potential, as a new report shows how the major social media networks currently stack up against each other. Big surprise: Facebook is doing fine. But Tumblr and Pinterest both showed amazing growth, too.

Meanwhile, Twitter announced new and possible features to turn the struggling company around. Finally, an upstart app, Yik Yak, secured funding along the lines of Snapchat, circa one year ago. Could it eventually challenge Snapchat's domination among young users?

You'll find out in this week's Social Media Saturday!

Facebook:

The Unbundling Strategy Worked

A 45-page report by Global Web Index came out earlier this week, as first reported by TechCrunch, and it gave a broad picture of the current state of the ongoing horserace that is the world of social media.

Obviously, Facebook remains the most popular app in the world. But Snapchat showed amazing growth in mobile, while Tumblr and Pinterest both came out on top in growth of active users.

In fact, you'd be forgiven for thinking Facebook was lagging behind in mobile growth at first blush. That's before you remember, as Quartz pointed out, that practically half the apps on Global Web Index's charts were created or are now owned by Facebook Inc. Of the top-growing social media and messaging apps for the last six months, for example, the second (Facebook Messenger), third (Instagram) and 11th (WhatsApp) are Facebook properties.

And Facebook Messenger was only barely edged out by Snapchat on that chart -- reminding us that, annoying as it may have been for users, Mark Zuckerberg's insistence that users download a separate app for Facebook messaging didn't alienate them at all. In fact, the gambit paid off nicely. 

And it's not like Facebook itself is going anywhere, anytime soon. In fact, according to the most recentSandvine mobile data analytics pointed out by Quartz, Facebook now accounts for about 20 percent of all data used by mobile phones. That's second only to YouTube, and it shows Zuckerberg's emphasis on video is also paying off.

Tumblr and Pinterest Boost Active Userbase

As mentioned, Pinterest and Tumblr (especially) surprised by leading in the growth of active userbases. As we previously reported, Pinterest has a knack for encouraging activity among their specific target audience, but in the last six months, active users more than doubled on the clipping and sharing network. On top of that, Pinterest also expanded its overall userbase by a leading 57 percent.

But Tumblr came out on top of active userbase growth, increasing that all-important measure by 120 percent, while growing overall by 45 percent. Despite Yahoo's long-standing reputation of making questionable acquisitions and often leaving its new firms for the scrap heap -- with Tumblr, Marissa Mayer's got to be doing something right.

Twitter:

Another Try at Boosting Commerce

Reporting on Twitter has become such a downer. Wall Street just seems to hate that company, and CEO Dick Costolo's attempts to please investors with staffing changes, new features, and Facebookization is tearing Twitter apart.This week, Twitter announced yet another attempt to boost its bottom line: Twitter Offers. The program is aimed at marketers who buy Promoted Tweets, and like the "Buy" button, it allows them to add discount coupons right inside the tweet.

Users looking to take advantage of a Twitter Offer can click on it, and if their Twitter account is linked to their debit or credit card, the discount will be applied automatically to the user's next credit card statement after they make a purchase at the real-world brick-and-mortar merchant.

According to The New York Times report, Twitter Offers can even be time-sensitive, adding urgency to follow up on impulse-clicked discount offers. And Twitter hopes it will be another way to show marketers instant engagement and return-on-investment, boosting commerce on the struggling social media network.

But Wired offers up good reasons why Offers might backfire, like most of Twitter's recent attempts at boosting its numbers. It all comes down to the question, "Whom is this actually convenient for?" Not Twitter users, it at least seems.

To get a discount, users must first link their credit cards with their Twitter account. Then, click on a Twitter Offer they like. Once they complete that online process, they have to go visit the same store (IRL) that's offering the discount they clicked on (or perhaps forgot they clicked on) when they were last using Twitter.

Even once they complete the in-store transaction -- being sure to remember to use the correct, linked credit card -- customers don't get an instantly applied discount. Instead, they have to wait for their credit card statement to see the savings. 

Buying Justin Bieber's Selfie-driven "Shots"?

After that breakdown, compared to Twitter Offers, the rumor that the company may be in talks to acquire "Shots" -- a selfie app backed by Justin Bieber and accordingly used mostly by young women -- actually sounds like a savvy move.

As CNBC reports, "Shots" has approximately 2 million female users under 24, making it a prime candidate to possibly boost Twitter's userbase -- especially with a demographic that would also boost Twitter's marketing appeal.

Yik Yak:

Worth Six Times What It Was a Week Ago

Another challenger to Snapchat's key demographic dominance just increased its war chest and valuation by 600 percent, more or less. The anonymous locality-based messaging app Yik Yak secured $62 million in a funding found this week, according to Mashable, and a new total valuation upwards of $500 million.

Yik Yak, for anyone not currently in college who may not be familiar, is kind of like a mashup of Swarm, Whisper, and Reddit -- with an old-timey 90's web bulletin board feel. It's absolutely exploded in popularity this year on college campuses, after launching less than a year ago in late 2013.

It's also popular with high school aged kids (though they're not supposed to have access to the app), leading to a ton of shenanigans and legitimate controversies -- ranging from general mischief to malicious bullying -- already surrounding the app during its short lifespan so far.

But controversy also means buzz, and young demographics mean advertising potential. Snapchat is aware of both of those points as it still dominates the youth demographic and continues to grow. But to put Yik Yak in perspective, this week it reached the same ballpark of venture funding and valuation that Snapchat arrived at in mid-2013. What happened soon after? A failed buyout bid from Facebook, which probably knew it'd be worth billions by now.

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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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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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