We’ve all heard it – Facebook is now Pay to Play. And while there are a lot of things you can do to increase your organic reach on Facebook investing in a Facebook Ad Campaign can help achieve results quickly.
But Facebook ads for bloggers involve several decisions and monitoring if you really want your campaign to succeed. First of all you have to decide on a budget. You can approach this anyway you want – set a daily amount, weekly amount or a flat fee for the whole campaign. How much should it be? Again, any amount you want but maybe start small – $1/day or $100 for a whole campaign.
Unfortunately you can’t tell how effective a campaign will be when you start but that’s why monitoring is so important. We’ve heard that you’ll want to spend no more than 6 cents per ew Facebook Like if you’re running a “Like” campaign. And the only way to know if you’re on target with that is to watch the campaign closely.
The amount you spend should also relate to your goals for the campaign. Facebook helps bloggers create campaigns based on specific goals with the different types of campaigns available.
So let’s quickly cover the types of campaigns. When you visit your Blog’s Facebook Page there is a “Promote” button at the top right corner. Facebook gives you four quick options but let’s look at everything that is available to us! Click on “Go To Ads Manager” then click the green “Create Ad” button up on the right. You’ll end up on the Facebook Ad Objectives Page. For Bloggers, the objectives that make the most sense are:
- Promote your Page (aka get more likes)
- Send people to your website (aka get more click throughs & fingers crossed readers)
- Boost your Posts (aka more likes and comments and shares on specific posts)
There are plenty more so depending on your objectives you can pick the one that is best for you!
Now we get to the bread and butter of Facebook Ads… Audience Targeting! It could be argued that no other site on the web can beat Facebook when it comes to knowing everything about their users. It is in the Audience Targeting that the value of Facebook ads shine through. There are plenty of factors to consider and play with but for us we’re going to focus on our Audience’s Interests and Location.
For interests you can pick hobbies, sport teams, TV shows but most importantly you can pick other sites or publications that have similar audiences to yours! A graphic on the right hand side of the page helps you determine if your criteria makes for too broad an audience or too specific of one.
After you’ve selected your audience you’ll set a budget and timeline for your campaign. Again, it’ll depend on what you are comfortable spending but Facebook tells you how many people you can expect to reach based on your budget. Once your campaign is live you’ll want to check in every day to see how it is performing!
The final step is to design the creative for your ads! You can choose up to 6 different images but the headline and text is uniform across each. As you monitor the performance of your campaign you can see it broken out by each picture and then you can decide which ones are working for you and which ones aren’t. End the ones that aren’t!
Facebook knows that people like short and sweet so if your headline or text is too long you’ll get a caution sign. It won’t actually stop you from saying more but it is a good lesson in brevity! The Ads Manager also shows you how each version of the ad will look – mobile, Instagram, sidebar.
Once you’ve designed your creative you are ready to place your order! Godspeed!
A few more thoughts
For our example today we set up a “Send people to your website” campaign since that is WCBC’s main goal at the moment. It is set up at $20/day for 14 days starting Sunday 2/28. There are 6 different images used in the creative and we set it up to push to Instagram as well. We’ll let you know how it goes!
We’ve heard that the Promote Your Page and Boost Your Posts ad types work for the duration of the campaign but if you ever stop paying for likes or post boosts, Facebook will bury your content again and you won’t organically reach any of the new followers you earned. We haven’t proven this with any real data but it seems like something Facebook would do.
Think critically about your objectives. Yes more likes on your Facebook page is never a bad thing but do you currently devote a significant amount of time to Facebook promotion? If you’re just thinking buying likes will help your numbers try some of the tips in the organic reach post first. Don’t waste your hard earned money!
Make sure you have a Call To Action button set up on your page! Think about having it direct people to a landing page or even your about page and make sure there is an option for them to sign up for your RSS or newsletter list.
For more analysis and ideas you can read how 44 different bloggers use Facebook Ads.