Solving the 10 Most Common Social Media Marketing Challenges

Today, there are 2.307 billion active social media users around the world. That’s nearly one-third of our planet’s total population of 7.125 billion!

As social media marketing professionals, we’re lucky to reach even .000001% of that population with any one of our posts. This can feel a bit underwhelming for businesses and marketers looking to demonstrate the true value and ROI of social media.

Everywhere we look it appears that brands and companies have it all figured outon social media. With each new post to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter comes thousands of likes, comments, and shares.

Even Grumpy Cat has earned more than $100 million dollars since 2012!

This leaves the rest of us wondering, “What are we not doing right on social media?”

We’ve experimented, made mistakes, and even learned a little bit in the process. From that, we’ve put together a playbook on solving the 10 most common social media marketing challenges.

Let’s jump in!

1. Authentic connection with the audience

We’ve been seeing a massive shift in what it means to be effective on social media over the last few years. One challenge that marketers are facing in this new era of social media marketing is connecting with audiences on an individual and personal level.

Connecting with your audience helps to humanize your brand and build real, authentic relationships.

Solving this challenge: 

Connect with your audience by utilizing free or low-cost brand monitoring tools such as Respond, Mention, or TweetDeck and respond to every single comment on Twitter.

Monitor all additional social media channels and respond to each comment in an authentic way. You can do this by asking questions, linking to other blog posts, providing insights, or offering help with a problem.

You may also consider creating and growing a niche forum or group on Facebook or LinkedIn, or even creating your own dedicated community site similar to inbound.org or GrowthHackers – this gives you the opportunity to engage with users as well as let them indulge their passions and connect with like-minded people.

2. Creating a social media marketing strategy

You may know what you want to accomplish and why, but without a social media marketing strategy, you won’t have a specific plan on how to get there.

Think of your social media plan as a roadmap to your goals – Sure, you can stop off and check out landmarks along the way (experimentation), but you’ll want to return to the road that gets you to your destination in the shortest time and distance (goals).

Solving this challenge: 

Creating a solid social media marketing strategy doesn’t have to take weeks to put together. For me, it helps to have 3 key things written down on paper:

• Why we’re on social: Simply being active of social media channels for the sake of being there is one of the quickest ways to burn valuable time and resources. First, answer the question of ‘why’  your business is on social and what you would like to accomplish.
• How we’re going to succeed: Next is to ask the question of how. This can be specific social channels, paid advertising budget, video or image creation, partnering with influencers.
• How we’ll measure success: Key Metrics, Goals or OKRs that you would like to accomplish broken down into days, weeks, months, and the year. Breaking it down like this will allow you to focus on day-to-day activities while also keeping the big picture in mind.

3. A dramatic drop in organic reach

What worked in 2012 when organic reach on social was booming vs. what’s working now with the decline of organic reach has many social media managers scrambling to find tactics that work, including myself.

If growing your organic reach doesn’t seem to be working, there may be another solution.Solving this challenge: 

Marketers can overcome this obstacle by looking at the decline of organic reach as an opportunity in disguise. That opportunity is paid social media advertising.

Even if you only have $5 to spend on boosting a Facebook post or promoting a Tweet, putting a few dollars behind the content you’ve worked hard to create will effectively get that content in front of hundreds potential customers. Look for posts with high engagement but low reach as a good barometer for potential success.

Use a combination of Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter Audience Insights to learn about your audience and create personas. Once you have an idea of who they are, use those insights to create highly-targeted ads that will resonate with users.

4. Coming up with consistently good content

We completely understand. Managing social media is extremely time-consuming, and can become a full-time job. Which is why staying creative and original is one of the toughest social media marketing challenges to overcome.

The social media manager checklist seems to go on forever: curate, create, schedule, monitor, respond, update, and reuse content across several different social profiles.

That’s why it’s important for social media marketers to find little hacks to optimize their time.

Solving this challenge: 

Besides basic content curation and idea generation tactics like monitoring Facebook pages or scouring Buzzsumo and Quora for content, there are other less time-consuming tactics you can experiment with today.

Openness & Transparency: Some of our most popular content and social media posts are ones that feature an inside look into Buffer’s culture.

People love knowing that there is a “real person” behind the social media profile and by giving them a look into your company or brand you will evoke real human interaction.

Original graphics: We’ve also generated some excellent buzz by creating original graphics in Pablo or Canva and posting them to our social channels. This image, for example, received more than 100 retweets on our Twitter account in less than an hour.

To create it, we pulled stats from around the web and put them into a simple graphic, which only took about 30 minutes to create.

5. Content quantity over quality

For some brands, the way to cut through all of the noise on social media is to simply post more. While this tactic may work for some, for many it has the tendency to irritate followers.

The Next Web posts 30-40 times per day on Facebook due to the high amount of new content they’re putting out online. But many businesses who are creating less content may struggle to show value from more frequent posting.

Solving this challenge: 

An excellent way to think about the quantity vs. quality is to treat every piece of content—every tweet, every Facebook post, every CTA, every press outreach email—with the utmost care, as Leo explains in our Buffer marketing manifesto.

People will naturally follow your brand over time from posting great content, not posting more content.

Marketers can benefit from embracing the “everything matters” mentality when generating content for their blog, graphics for social media, and forums for connecting.

6. Getting content to a large social audience

Now that you have all of this great content for your blog and social media channels, people will surely follow, right?

As marketers know, this isn’t always the case. Promoting content, partnering with brands and influencers, and capturing audiences’ attention is a whole new social media challenge in itself.

The encouraging news is that if your content is enjoyed by a few people on your blog, then the chances are that people on social media will enjoy it as well. The challenge is getting it to those people.

Solving this challenge:

Just like in investing, the “Compound Effect” is a powerful idea that works with social media promotion as well.

Let’s say every one person on Twitter has 100 friends that follow them, and those 100 friends have 100 friends that follow them. Even if only 5% of the total friends share your content, that’s still a massive amount of shares and impressions.

The key is not to sit back and hope that people share your content, but toactively seek out people that you know will benefit from it. A few ideas to get you started:

• Email your friends, family, and coworkers
• Direct message influencers–in a genuine way–on social media
• Join LinkedIn groups or online forums in your niche market
• Syndicate your content (A complete guide from Neil Patel)
• Republish content to Medium
• Ask questions and respond to comments on Quora

7. Finding ways to encourage sharing on social

One thing that is particularly challenging on social media is finding ways to avoid what I like to call a “creative rut.” A creative rut is when social media managers find a tactic that works a few times and then continually go back to them over and over, even though the results may be even or declining.

Only posting blog links on Facebook, quotes on Instagram, or links to your own articles on Twitter are examples of content that is good, but could maybe use a creative boost.

Solving this challenge: 

Think “share first” by getting inside the mind of your audience. Before posting ask, “Is this something that I would like, comment on, read, or share on social media?” If the answer is “no” that may be a sign to look for other types of content.

The New York Times once published an excellent study on the psychology of sharing. It boiled down to the fact that sharing on social media is all about relationships. The study indicated that 49% of respondents said they share to bring valuable and entertaining content to others.

Jeff Bullas shared an excellent list of 10 ways to create contagious content with some fun ideas including:

• Telling Great Stories
• Making Your Audience Look Smart & Classy
• Using Emotional Appeal

8. Using data to back intuition

How many of us wing it when tracking data in order to guide our social media strategy? I know I’ve been guilty of this a few times!

Previously, social media data was hard to access, difficult to understand, and seemingly useless. But these days, there are so many amazing tools out there that accessing data is a must-do for marketers looking to take their social to the next level.

Solving this challenge: 

Start by creating a simple Excel spreadsheet with each of the social media channels that you’re managing on the left and the most important stats you would like to track across the top.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the sheet I use: (Download the full Social Media Metrics Dashboard):

Tracking metrics week-to-week and month-to-month helps me to visualize if my intuition is working. That way I can quickly implement experiments, track the data, and pivot to another tactic if things aren’t on the rise.

Check out the entire Buffer Social Media Strategy to see how we pulled the data from each network so that you can start tracking your own.

9. Creating quality visuals and graphics

Visuals and graphics are the second most important factor for success on social media right behind the quality content. But creating quality visuals and graphics are another challenge on their own, regarding skill level and time it takes to create them.

Seeing as how visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content, there’s never been a better time to invest in visuals of your own.

Solving this challenge:

Two of our favorite go-to sources of great visuals are high-quality stock photos and original images created by our team.

For high-quality stock photos, we’ve put together a massive list of 53+ free image sources. For original images, we suggest either Pablo or Canva. Each is fun, easy to use, and allow marketers to customize each image size based on the targeted social media channel.

A few design rules of thumb:

• Avoid overused stock photos
• Ensure each image is properly sized for specific networks
• Use best-practices with text overlay
• Design with consistent brand colors, palettes, and logos

*Infographic created by Ethos3 

10. Focusing on the things that matter most

A common thought in the social media sphere is that there’s a silver bullet of growth and engagement. The truth is that it takes a lot of work to create a community of engaged followers and brand advocates.

Growth and engagement are a result of a variety of factors, but figuring out which activities to focus on is an important challenge in social media marketing.

Solving this challenge:

When putting first things first, it’s helpful for me to refer to Brian Balfour’sGrowth Machine. Brian points out that a lot of marketers focus on tactics first, rather than creating a growth process.

Tactics first is putting the cart before the horse.  You need a process that will help you build a scalable, predictable, and repeatable growth machine.

– Brian Balfour

The most important part is having one growth process and sticking to it no matter what.

Know your channels, your audience, and your market inside and out and make strategic experiment decisions based on those learnings. Doing so will help to focus on the things that matter most.

Over to you!

Thanks for reading! What challenges do you often face when it comes to social media? We’d love to hear from you below!

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Social Media Marketing: How to Optimize Social Profiles for Search

Social Media Marketing: How to Optimize Social Profiles for Search.

Your social network is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness and sales. It provides you with a place to share content, communicate with customers and show how your product or service offers value to the community. However, there is only so much time and money that you can spend increasing your following. How can you grow your social networks organically?

Optimize for Search

Anything that is available for public viewing on a social media site will be indexed by Google. This means that you have a chance to rank for keywords when you create your Facebook page, Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, or Pinterest account. When done correctly, you will receive targeted traffic to your social media page, which should have links to your website or anywhere else that people can go to buy your product or your service.

How to Optimize for Search

You want to use keywords that are closely associated with your business and use them in the appropriate areas. This means creating a page name, URL and short description that has a targeted keyword in it. For instance, if you were a cosmetic dentist, you might have that keyword as part of your Facebook page, Twitter bio, or LinkedIn job description. You want to do this because Google will use information from these sections when it decides what to index.

Here is an example video on how to do this for LinkedIn:

The Advantages of Organic Search Traffic

There are many advantages to organic search traffic such as the fact that it is targeted and easier to convert. If you are a cosmetic dentist, you will get traffic from those looking to get their teeth fixed and need those services. Organic traffic is also cheaper to acquire, which enables you to get a larger return on the time that you took to create an optimized page.

Want More Local Customers to Find You Online? Download Your Local SEO Checklist Instantly!​

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HOW TO FIND YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE ON FACEBOOK

Targeting all one billion Facebook users may seem like the right way to get your brand out there, but you’d be wasting your money by reaching people who may not be interested in your message. Not only are you reaching users who are less likely interact with your content, but you’re also more likely to pay more per person for more eyes on your ad, especially when they’re not your target audience on Facebook. 

Instead of trying to reach as many users a possible, focus on targeting users who are more likely to engage with your content. The more relevant your ad, the higher your Facebook Relevance Score will be, which means the cost of reaching those users will be lower. Earlier this year Facebook rolled out theRelevance Score reporting metric, which takes into account the positive and negative feedback they expect the ad to receive from its target audience. The less relevant your message, the lower the score, and this could lead to higher costs because the Facebook delivery system is designed to show the right content to the right people. 

Not sure who to target? The Facebook Audience Insights tool is a great start to learning about your current fan base, acquiring additional fans or identifying new ones. The tool is designed to help advertisers learn more about their audience with information on geography, demographics, purchase behavior, and more. 



There are many ways to target your post, but don’t feel overwhelmed! You don’t have to use all of the targeting options at the same time. Here’s a list of targeting options I’ve found useful.

GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION

Is your product only sold in certain areas of the United States, or is your message only relevant to those in the Midwest? Instead of targeting all of the United States, focus on areas where your audience is located. You can target as general as the state level or as specific as the ZIP Code™ level. You can also target a 10-50 mile radius of a city or ZIP so you don’t have to spend time entering the ZIP Codes of specific locations.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Facebook demographics can be incredibly specific with characteristics that include education, employment, household, and lifestyle. Instead of a combining all of the characteristics in a single target, consider breaking them up into separate targets so that you’re able to optimize towards the better performing target.

INTERESTS

Of all of the targeting options available on Facebook, this is my go-to target, as it tends to perform well every time. That’s likely because your message is likely to be aligned with what your audience already likes on Facebook.

Targeting is about both precision and experimenting as you discover how to reach the most relevant audience for your content. Facebook has all kinds of tools to help you test and learn, see what works, and optimize in order to reach the right people. When you do, it has great rewards.

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Blogging: Stop Following, Start Exploring

The title “Stop following. Start Exploring.” is the slogan for a popular Indian educational portal Shiksha (means education), but it also holds true for bloggers. As a newbie bloggers, most of us start with choosing a niche for our blogs. Some of us don’t even know what niche we should choose. Whether, it should be a multi-niche blog or  a single niche blog, etc.  Now even if you somehow figure out the niche you are interested in and created a blog with related domain name, the next step is to curate contents for the blog.

The old saying in the blogging world is “content is the king”. But, how true is that? I would say very true and content is the only thing, which differentiate your blog from the millions of blogs on the internet. Now to create contents for your blog, the popular method is to bookmark popular websites related to your niche and try to figure out what is working for them and what is not. For example, if you are interested in gadget niche you may follow something like GSMArena, Anandtech, Phonecurrent and create a similar website.

Bookmarking popular websites isn’t a bad idea nor analyzing them. However, following them extensively to the core where you start focusing on only a few popular blogs and trying to be like them will not take you anywhere. After a year of blogging, you will find yourself nowhere in the crowd and you may ultimately quit blogging. And the popular blogs which you were following w

Why? Because, you chose to follow them, and they chose to explore.

#Stop Following 

No popular websites on any niche became popular overnight. There are various factors, which have contributed to their success. They have started early, they chose a niche which wasn’t populated by that time and most of them are godfathers of their niche. They started from the scratch and were really passionate about what they are doing.

Now among all these factors, there is one more thing which has made them what  they are now. Now, before I spill the beans, let me ask you one thing.

Which popular blogs, those bloggers used to follow? Note that there weren’t many popular blogs that time and almost everyone was a beginner.

The answer is none. Instead of following anything, they choose to explore things, which were related to their niche. They still do the same and we still do the same as well. That is following them.

I began my blogging journey with the same attitude of following some of the most popular blogs related to technology niche. I started as a writer for tech blogs, which helped in learning about blogging. Later, I created my own blog in the technology niche. Fortunately, after 6 months of blogging I was in better position than most of the tech bloggers in the same field who started even before a year than my blog went live.

You may call it a luck or just coincidence, I was able to choose topics, which were low competitive as well as had high search volume without using any SEO software. I did apply some basic SEO techniques, which worked perfectly well with the blog. After 8 months of blogging, the blog was getting around 300K pageviews a month, among which 90% of the traffic was organic, 2% from social media and 8% from referral.

Woohoo, happy ending, right? Nope.

Now after 2 years of starting the blog, the blog is still in a strong position, but couldn’t bring the satisfaction a genuine blogger will look from his blog. If I ask myself how exactly is my blog different from thousands of other technology blogs on the internet? How many topics I started before anyone in the web world and found solutions for them? well, I barely could answer anything. Except the fact that it has grown large, brings good revenue and I never applied any Black hack techniques. Is that enough? Well, at least not for me.

#Start Exploring 

Since I keep creating new blogs every now and then, this time I thought of building a blog, which purely contains solutions or topics discovered by me (mostly). The blog is Technicalnotes and as the name indicates, it is a tech blog and technology is the niche I love.

For this blog, I stopped following and started exploring. I also did not use any off page SEO tactics to make it achieve good rankings in search results. It wasn’t necessary because the contents in the blog were first to be published in any blog on the internet. As far as link building is concerned, if you are the first one to publish anything important, the links will flow automatically as the popular tech blogs will pick your contents and link back to them as reference or source. Basically, you are making them follow you, instead of following them.

Now talking about the result so far (though, it’s too early), in last few months the blog has grown much faster than I thought and the results are impressive. It has quality  and unique posts. The links coming to the blog are natural and at the end of the day you will have something original, which you have created by exploring things instead of following.

Conclusion 

If you are a newbie, have started blogging in 2015-2016 and looking for a long-term goal, I would recommend you to start exploring things on your own than simply following the footsteps of the popular. Try to create your own contents, do extensive research and then publish your post. It may look difficult in the beginning, but you will grow to be a much experienced and mature blogger with an opinion over the years.

Blogging is a crowded place with more number of spammers coming with new tactics to trick the Google algorithm every day. Now if you don’t create a unique blog with unique contents, then there is no reason for Google to rank your blog higher than the blogs which has contents similar to your blog and have published it before you could. And the possibility is that Google may just destroy all your hard work by penalizing it for the crime you didn’t commit while targetting the spammy blogs. Now it’s completely your choice to create something which is worth having and boosting about or just follow the masses.

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How to Create Facebook Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Facebook

When setting up a paid Facebook ad, there are a lot of boxes to be checked. 

Are you targeting the right people? Are your image dimensions to scale? Are you running the right type of ad? If we're being honest, it can get a little confusing. 

With more than 1.4 billion people using Facebook and over 900 million visits every day, Facebook offers up a unique opportunity for marketers to augment their organic efforts. Trouble is, with both an investment of time and money on the line, there's not much room for oversight.

To help, we've put together a checklist to help you keep all of your campaign details straight. It will help ensure that you're tapping into the right audience with the right ad at the right time.

What are you waiting for? Get to checkin'.

The Ultimate Checklist for Creating & Optimizing Facebook Ads

Facebook offers a wide variety of paid ad options and placements, but all ads can be broken down into three elements: 

1. Campaigns. The campaign houses all of your assets.
2. Ad sets. If you're targeting separate audiences with different characteristics, you'll need an individual ad set for each.
3. Ads. Your actual ads live within your ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary in color, copy, images, etc.

With that terminology out of the way, let's dive in to creating an ad.

  Determine the most appropriate editor.

Facebook offers users two different tools for creating a paid ad: the Ads Manager and thePower Editor. When deciding which one is the best fit for you, you'll want to consider both your company size and the number of ads you plan to run at once. 

While the Ads Manager best suits most companies, the Power Editor serves as a tool for larger advertisers who are looking for more precise control over a variety of campaigns. For the sake of this article, we're going to detail how to create an ad using the Ads Manager. (For more on how to create an ad using the Power Editor, check out this step-by-step article from Kissmetrics.)

  Choose an objective.

Facebook's Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed with your campaign objective in mind. Before getting started, Ads Manager will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign:

There are 10 different objectives to choose from. The list includes everything from sending people to your website to getting installs of your app to raising attendance at your event. 

By choosing one of these objectives, you're giving Facebook a better idea of what you'd like to do so they can present you with the best-suited ad options. Facebook's ad options include:

• Page Post Engagements
• Page Likes
• Click to Website
• Website Conversions
• App Installs
• App Engagement
• Event Responses
• Offer Claims
• Video Views
• Local Awareness

Let's say, for sake of this post, that you're looking to drive more traffic to your website. When you select this option, Facebook will prompt you to enter the URL you're looking to promote. If you're using marketing automation software, be sure to create a unique tracking URL with UTM parameters for this to ensure that you'll be able to keep track of traffic and conversions from this ad. For HubSpot customers, this can be done using the Tracking URL Builder. 

Once selected, Facebook will then display the ad option that makes the most sense in terms of achieving this objective. 

  Choose your audience.

If you're just starting out with paid advertising on Facebook, it's likely that you'll have to experiment with several different targeting options until you reach an audience that fits just right. 

To help you narrow your focus, Facebook's targeting criteria are accompanied by an audience definition gauge. This tool -- located to the right of the audience targeting fields -- takes all of your selected properties into consideration in order to come up with a potential reach number. 

If you're wavering between choosing a specific audience over a broad one, consider your objective. If you're looking to drive traffic, you'll probably want to focus on the type of people you know will be interested in your offering. However, if you're looking to build brand awareness or promote a widely appealing offer, feel free to focus on a more general audience. 

Facebook's built-in targeting is vast, including options such as:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Relationship
• Education
• Work
• Financial
• Home
• Ethnic Affinity
• Generation
• Parents
• Politics (U.S. only)
• Life Events
• Interests
• Behaviors
• Connections

You also have the option to select a Custom Audience -- this allows you to target people on Facebook who are in your company's contact database, visited a page on your website that has a tracking pixel, or use your app or game. To learn more about how to set up an Custom Audience on Facebook, check out these instructions. (And for more on the specifics of these criteria, visit this Facebook targeting resource.)

Once you find a group that responds well to your ads, Facebook allows you to save these audiences to be used again later -- so you may not need to dive into this step once you've been running Facebook ads for a while.

  Set your budget.

Facebook offers advertisers the option to set either a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Here's how they differ from one another:

• Daily budget. If you want your ad set to run continuously throughout the day, this is the option you'll want to go for. Using a daily budget means that Facebook will pace your spending per day. Keep in mind that the minimum daily budget for an ad set is $1.00 USD and must be at least 2X your CPC.
• Lifetime budget. If you're looking to run your ad for a specified length of time, select lifetime budget. This means that Facebook will pace your spend over the time period you set for the ad to run. 

To further specify your budgeting, turn to the advanced options. This section allows you to specify a few things:

Schedule

Choose whether or not your want your campaign to run immediately and continuously or if you want to customize the start and end dates. You can also set parameters so that your ads only run during specific hours and days of the week.

Optimization & Pricing

Choose whether or not you want to bid for your objective, clicks, or impressions. (This will alter how your ad is displayed and paid for.) By doing so, you'll pay for your ad to be shown to people within your target audience that are more likely to complete your desired action, but Facebook will control what your maximum bid is.

If you don't want Facebook to set optimal bids for you, you'll want to opt for manual bidding. This option awards you full control over how much you're willing to pay per action completed. However, Facebook will provide a suggested bid based on other advertisers' behavior to give you a sense of what you should shoot for. 

Delivery

Delivery type falls under two categories: standard and accelerated. Standard delivery will show your ads throughout the day, while accelerated delivery helps you reach an audience quickly for time-sensitive ads (Note: this option requires manual bid pricing).

  Create your ad.

What do you want your ad to look like? It all depends on your original objective. 

If you're looking to increase the number of clicks to your website, Facebook's Ad Manager will suggest the Click to Website ad options. Makes sense, right?

This ad option is broken down into two formats: Links and Carousels. Essentially, this means that you can either display a single image ad (Links) or a multi-image ad (Carousel) with three to five scrolling images at no additional cost.

A Links ad will be displayed like this:

A Carousel ad will be displayed like this:

 

Once you decide between the two, you'll need to upload your creative assets. It's important to note that for each type of ad, Facebook requires users to adhere to certain design criteria.

For single image ads, they ask that users adhere to the following considerations:

• Text: 90 characters
• Link Title: 25 characters
• Image ratio: 1.91:1
• Image size: 1200 pixels x 627 pixels. (Use a minimum image width of 600 pixels for ads appearing in News Feed.)

For multi-image ads -- also known as Carousel Ads -- Facebook provides the following design recommendations: 

• Recommended image size: 600 x 600 pixels
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Text: 90 characters
• Headline: 40 characters
• Link description: 20 characters
• Your image may not include more than 20% text. See how much text is on your image.

Keep in mind that these are the ad options for the "send people to your website" objective.

If you selected "boost your posts," you'd be presented with different ad options like the Page Post Engagement: Photo ad. This ad has a unique set of design recommendations. To explore all of the ad options and their design specifics, refer to this resource.

Once you select an ad type, the Ads Manager will prompt you to identify how you'd like to display your ad. The options they provide are as follows: Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, and Desktop Right Column.

Here's how each ad would appear:

Desktop News Feed

Mobile News Feed

Desktop Right Column

Be aware if your ad isn't associated with a Facebook page, you'll only be able to run Desktop Right Column ads. To leverage all three display locations, you can learn how to create a Facebook Page here.

  Report on the performance.

Once your ads are running, you'll want to keep an eye on how they're doing. To see their results, you'll want to look in two places: the Facebook Ad Manager and your marketing software.

Facebook's Ad Manager

Facebook's Ad Manager is a sophisticated dashboard that provides users with an overview of all their campaigns.

Upfront, the dashboard highlights an estimate of how much you're spending each day. The dashboard is organized by columns, which makes it easy to filter through your ads so you can create a custom view of your results. Key numbers like reach, frequency, and cost are readily available, making reporting on performance a no brainer. 

According to Facebook, here are some of the key metrics to look for (and their definitions):

• Performance. Can be customized further to include metrics like results, reach, frequency and impressions
• Engagement. Can be customized further to include metrics like Page likes, Page engagement and post engagement
• Videos. Can be customized further to include metrics like video views and avg. % of video viewed
• Website. Can be customized further to include metrics like website actions (all), checkouts, payment details, purchases and adds to cart
• Apps. Can be further customized to include metrics like app installs, app engagement, credit spends, mobile app actions and cost per app engagement
• Events. Can be further customized to include metrics like event responses and cost per event response
• Clicks. Can be further customized to include metrics like clicks, unique clicks, CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost per click)
• Settings. Can be further customized to include metrics like start date, end date, ad set name, ad ID, delivery, bid and objective

Your Marketing Software

While there are certainly a lot of details to keep straight when planning a paid Facebook ad, it's important that you don't lose sight of the big picture. Reporting on clicks and conversions from Facebook is important, however, if you're using URLs with specific UTM codes, you have an opportunity to measure your ads' full-funnel effectiveness using your marketing software. 

Tracking URLs will help your marketing software keep track of how many leads, or better yet, how many customers you've gained from your advertising efforts. This information is useful in determining the ROI of this source, and can also be used to inform your targeting strategy.

If you're a HubSpot customer, you can create unique tracking codes for your Facebook campaign by navigating to the Tracking URL Builder on the Reports Home page. All you'll need to do is plug in the URL, attach a campaign, and choose the source you want the URL to be attributed to in your Sources Report. Once your ad launches and you start getting traffic and conversions on your website, you'll be able to easily track how many visits, contacts, and customers you're generating.

Source

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