facebook Archives - BlitzMetrics

Publishing Your Unpublished (Dark) Posts on Facebook

February 17, 2017 By Kyler Patterson Leave a Comment

If you’re running ads on Facebook, you probably already know what a unpublished (dark) post is. Just in case you don’t know, it’s a post that is used to promote your message to people without being on your Facebook page. I wrote an article on the HostGator blog if you need more detail on what a dark post is and how to create it.

Dark posts are great because you can do many different things with them. One example is that you can run different ads to test how a message will perform in front of an audience. But after you’ve found the winning message, what do you do now? Recreate the post and press Publish?

Sure – you can do that. But then you lose the value of the ads you paid for, the social proof. All of the likes, comments, and shares are now gone because it’s a new post.

With this post, I’m going to show you how you can publish your post live to your page so that it can begin earning organic reach. Since it already has social proof from the paid reach, it will publish to the page with the same reach and hopefully gather more engagement.
Please watch this video for more details. If you are unable to watch the video, I’ve included the steps below.

Step 1 – In your ad manager, click the hamburger on the top left of the page.

Step 2 – Hover over “All Tools” and then select the Page Posts option. This will show you all of your dark posts by default. If you need to, you can change your page on the top left.

Step 3 – Select the post you wish to publish. You can use their search feature to help identify your post.

Step 4 – Next to the search feature is the Actions drop down. Click that and select Publish. This will publish the post live to your page.

I hope you found this tip to be helpful. If you have any questions about these steps, or what you can do in Facebook in general, please leave a comment and we will be happy to give you more details.

How to save and edit Facebook Live videos

February 16, 2017 By Max Darby Leave a Comment

If you’re doing a lot of Facebook Live videos, perhaps for a conference, then you may have lamented the inability to edit it. There’s a quick way for you to download any video off of Facebook- here’s how:

On a desktop device, right click and select “Show Video URL”:

A box will pop up. Copy the URL that appears in it:

Now paste it into your address bar, but replace “https://www.” with just “m.”, so that it looks like “m.facebook.com/….”

You’ll now see the page in Mobile mode, which comes with the ability to save the video file as a .mp4. Simply click “Play” and then look in the bottom right corner.

Your browser will download the movie file into your Downloads folder:

You can now open it in any movie editor to do with as you please. If you don’t have one, you can use an online tool such as online-video-cutter.com to trim out unwanted sections:

And that’s how simple it is to download and edit Facebook Live videos! Note that you can also use this on normal videos as well. Perfect for building your speaker reel or snagging that perfect little clip.

7 Hidden Reasons Why Companies Fail at Facebook Advertising

April 21, 2016 By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

We’ve seen so many companies who are competent at traditional PPC get destroyed when trying to do Facebook advertising. Let’s cover the most common mistakes and how to solve them:

Keywords are not interests: You have keywords on Google versus interests on Facebook. In the former, someone is actively searching for something and is expressing immediate intent. In the latter, you’re targeting WHO someone is, as opposed to WHEN they are going to buy. You’re likely hitting them weeks and months before they search, so your targeting and ad copy must be different. We’ve seen PPC companies attempt to peddle translation tools that convert search keywords into Facebook interests. You might as well make chicken salad out of chicken poop– not possible. In search you know WHEN, but not WHO– in Facebook, you know WHO, but not when.
Ads take users away from Facebook: Users who are on Facebook don’t appreciate being yanked out of their browsing experience. So don’t send them to your website– send them to your Facebook fan page.
The ad copy is too forward: Imagine you’re having a nice dinner with a friend. Then some loud salesman interrupts your meal to pitch his wares. You’ve never seen this guy before— he’s not a friend, and you aren’t exactly interested in buying his stuff right NOW, though it’s something you might consider later. That’s what Facebook advertisers do today– they shout over the din of the other shouting advertisers, just as you see in the content networks. On Facebook, you don’t have to shout because you can microtarget and whisper quietly because…
There isn’t multi-step engagement: Because advertisers are trying to go from impression all the way through to the sale in the same visit (yes, it works in PPC because you can target bottom of funnel terms), they fail. Instead, have one set of ads designed only to get fans of the right target audience. Then another set of ads messaging just fans. Then another set of ads for friends of fans. You wouldn’t say the same thing to someone off the street versus a friend you’ve known for a while, now would you? In Facebook PPC, you can segment your messaging by their level of engagement with you. And no, this concept is not available in the mainstream PPC tools– those software companies are still trying to jam the round peg in the square hole.

They aren’t refreshing ads daily: In PPC you can make some ads and they can live a long time. We have ads that are years old that continue to build Quality Score. We just leave those campaigns as is– set it and forget it. In Facebook, ads burn out in days. In fact, the narrower the audience, the faster the burnout. Google ads don’t burn out because it’s a different set of users searching on the keyword each day. In Facebook, you’re hitting the same inventory over and over– especially since the average user spends 7 hours a week on Facebook and consumes dozen of pages. With no frequency capping on Facebook, you better keep your ad copy fresh– not just because you want to split test, but because you don’t want to burn out by wasting inventory on the same people over and over.
Their analytics is sending you the wrong message: If you’re measuring conversion, odds are that it’s the unspoken last click attribution. In other words, the user may have come to your site multiple times via organic, paid search, email, social, or other sources– but only that last click (likely a branded Google click) got 100% of the credit. In paid search, there is the concept of the “assist” and the “view through conversion” to give credit to other touchpoints prior to conversion. In the world of multi-channel marketing, where consumers take in multiple inputs before making a decision, you have to measure how many Facebook visits (or even impressions) resulted in an eventual conversion later. Facebook does have a conversion tracking tool and Ads API.
They are going for exposure: True, when you have a new page, you want to get a lot of fans. If you’re a media buyer, you might even be looking for raw CPMs. But a fan is not a fan. You need to measure what those fans are worth. And there is no one size fits all– you can’t just use the figure of $3.65 per fan and multiply by the number of fans you have. You have to measure how many of your fans eventually converted and then calculate back to an average fan value. If 5% of your fans eventually buy something and that something is worth $100, then a fan is worth $5 with full attribution. If you find the overlap is 33% between channels on average (3 visits on average between all channels prior to conversion), then your fan is worth $5 divided by 3– or $1.67.

There are no software packages that will save you from these pitfalls– you or someone in your organization must develop the targeting, ad copy, and landing tabs that reflect your unique selling proposition. In the same way that great traditional PPC has tight linkages between the keyword, ads, and landing page– on Facebook, you must have tight interests, ultra personal ad copy, and many interest-related posts.

Now You Can Create Ads Where 75% Of Users See Them, On Smartphones!

August 24, 2015 By David Chojnacki 1 Comment

Did you know that 75% of Facebook traffic occurs from mobile devices around the world? So wouldn’t you think that mobile ad managing is the same way? Probably not yet because Facebook just launched its Ads Manager app a few months ago – while the Facebook mobile app itself has been around for years.

I’ll show you how to navigate through the app and gain definite kudos from your clients or for yourself as you easily manage their/your account via mobile:

Upon entering the app and signing in, along with the usual facebook blue, there are help texts along the way:

Let’s create a campaign! I’ll use my friend Dennis Yu’s page for explanatory purposes.

You can either boost a post you’ve made already, reach people near your company’s business address (location targeting), or send people to your website.

Let’s send people to his website:

From here, it’s easy enough to tell that the next step is to choose a picture from his page, or you can take a picture with your smartphone’s camera.

Position the picture as desired:

Create your ad copy that will intrigue your audience, (next step) to click on the ad:

While creating your ad, The Facebook Ads Manager app also allows you to add a Call-to-Action Button. Choose the button that fits most with your ad:

To help you out, Facebook includes the following about Interests.

“Facebook can help you reach people by looking at their interests, activities, the pages they have liked and closely related topics. Consider words beyond those that describe your business or brand.”

For example, a flower shop might choose an interest like “weddings”.

For more examples, we put online marketing, and online advertising:

Be elaborate to get the most out of your targeting, but also certain that the people you target will desire to know more about your ad.

Is this ad directed towards both genders? Choose accordingly, along with the age group (You don’t want to be advertising alcoholic beverages to underage teenagers!):

You’re almost done! Now just choose your budget and schedule and you’ve made your first ad!

*If you’re just starting out, Dennis Yu has an amazing concept of Facebook marketing with gaining results at just $5 a day.

You ready for Instagram Ads?

August 18, 2015 By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Self service ads for Instagram are available on Monday, August 17th.

If you’ve got engagement campaigns on Facebook, you should replicate a few of them over to Instagram inside your Business Manager.

I predict this will lead to some “pollution” of the Instagram environment, since direct response has never been the haven of Instagram, which is for sharing beautiful photos.

Previously only big brands have done ads, with great success if you count engagement and awareness as success metrics. So we’ll be testing to see how well we can convert, especially with remarketing between the two platforms.

Note that video views are one of the 3 possible ad objectives you can select, but that it’s available only through the Ads API. The Ads API opened up for access to everyone a year ago. You used to have to apply, but now anyone can get basic access. Plus there is pre-made code for you to play with.

This is going to be huge.

And only marketers who have strong images and video will succeed here. If you’re getting used to creating video (perhaps you’ve jumped on the Periscope bandwagon of 2 million uniques a day but only two dozen folks broadcasting at any time), then you can carry it over here.

Here is Facebook’s deck on how to get set-up.

Want to read more by Dennis Yu? For more content follow him here:

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/author/dennis

https://www.facebook.com/dennisyu

https://twitter.com/dennisyu

What is the best way to determine a page’s ROI?

July 13, 2015 By Dennis Yu 3 Comments

Everyone wants to determine the ROI on their page likes and be able to directly attribute a page like’s value relative to a conversion. But there’s been confusion conveying this value in a way that’s measurable back to that bottom dollar.

So what’s the best way to track this or paint a better picture on the value of a like?

At the end of the day, if they attribute conversion value back to these likes, then they are interested in pushing the throttle a bit heavier.

To answer this age-old question on the value of a fan (just Google “value of a fan Dennis Yu“) we need to make sure we’ve got the “plumbing” in place to enable this measurement. Two foundational articles:

You have to connect the top and bottom of the funnel to tie fan (or top funnel) activity to hard dollar ROI.

Perhaps the easiest way is to look at pairings of direct and two step sequences, where one ad is sending non-fans (of whatever targeting type) to a conversion page and the other ad is sending that same target filtered to also be fans.

You’d expect that fans convert better.

And the difference is a rough form of lift testing.

Here’s a page from our weekly reporting template to see how to set up such a pairing.

But why assess just the incremental funnel impact of someone becoming a fan?

Why not look at the contribution from them joining the email list (which is like becoming a fan), visiting the site, searching on our brand terms, etc?

The heart of marketing automation is deconstructing complex interaction sequences into simple pairs.

And each pair is measuring the difference in conversion value between directly going from X to Y versus going to X to an intermediate step and then to Y.

There is a bit of chicken and egg here, since someone may already be a fan in real life, just not on Facebook.

It’s not possible to fully eliminate the correlation and causation issue here.

But if you really want to get that extra level of precision, then you’d set up factorial tests with these pairings by geo.

Some randomized DMAs (designated market area) would get the fan acquisition campaigns, while others don’t.

Beyond the directly trackable effects of fan growth, which is tied in closely with generating reach, we have the softer benefits of brand growth.

Measure this via aided and unaided recognition in brand perception surveys, increase in conversion or brand search volume, or general increases in engagement. There are mountains written about how to assess the value of a brand, independent of channel.

But for the immediate, direct hard dollar ROI of fan acquisition via Facebook, we’d set up these pairings as described above.

This lets us measure the incremental impact of fan acquisition campaigns, so long we take care to give these fans enough time to move down the funnel.

Marketing, not just social marketing, is about establishing these journeys and measuring the value of these nurtured touchpoints.

Facebook apps still drive results if you run ads to boost them (Amanda Brazel and Mike Gingerich share their data)

June 23, 2014 By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Meet Amanda Brazel, a social media consultant who is promoting her new Instagram training course.

She’s promoting the course on her Facebook page via a couple tabs, amplified with ads.
These drove 14 sign-ups to the free group. Depending on what products/services you offer, calculate what a lead or new customer is worth to you.

2,477 fans is decent for a social agency, while the 94 PTAT (weekly active users) and 34 ratings (average of 4.4 stars) means she’s actively engaging users.

Now let’s take a look at their Facebook insights to trace what happened.
You can download the page and post level CSV files from your page, by the way.
No special software needed.

Starting with the “key metrics” tab on the page-level file, we see 65 average engaged users and 602 daily reach each day prior to the campaign.

An engaged user is someone who is clicking on our content, which can be a photo view, like, share, comment, or navigational click.

Daily organic reach is how many people saw your post that day, minus ad-driven reach.

Look what happens when she spends a few dollars a day on ads (yellow highlighting).

Of course, the paid reach and total reach numbers go up, as do the number of engaged users.

But what’s interesting is that organic reach increases, too.

As engagement grows on the page, Facebook’s algorithm rewards her with more exposure in subsequent posts.

Her “social proof” increases, meaning that there is more engagement to amplify. The newsfeed is all about context (what your friends are doing), so Amanda is driving both reach and engagement.

Mike Gringerich from TabSite shared his thoughts on Facebook’s recent changes, and the strategy behind Amanda’s campaigns:

Social Media marketers need to adapt their Facebook strategy in 2014 to keep current and achieve results! Facebook has made changes to their algorithm on what type of posts people see, frustrating some brands and marketers.

The fact remains, however, that Facebook is a great place to reach a highly specific audience at an affordable cost. The combination of engaging organic posts and some specific Facebook Ads can be a great combo that helps achieve real business results.

Amanda Brazel is a business and social media consultant serving small and medium sized businesses who are wanting to improve the effectiveness of their social media marketing.

The Problem:

How to cost-effectively grow her email sign-up list related to groups and training she offers.

The Plan:

To use Facebook organic posts and ads to drive sign-ups for the Instagram Business Success Group.

The Posts and Ads:

Amanda is personable and engaging. She naturally interacts and uses posts that are a blend of business and personal to increase engagement.

To demonstrate how Amanda engages her audience with media-rich content:

She always has a link to a “wait-list”:

Which helps drive people to her email list:

Which allows for further interaction opportunities through Custom Audiences, and email campaigns.

Thanks to Amanda Brazel and Mike Gingerich for their data.

5 reasons I defriend people on Facebook.

June 22, 2014 By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Ever get the itch to drop in on old friends on Facebook? Have you searched for a person you swore you were friends with then discover you’re not?

How do people choose their friends on Facebook? Sometimes it’s pure interest in someone’s images, or they are a celebrity in their industry, or you actually know who they are- a mixture of everything.

Defriending is also random. Arizona’s FOX10 News featured why people remove others on Facebook:

High school friends. You haven’t seen them in forever, and if you were good buddies, they’d be in your close circles already.
Friends of friends. Your friends friend is also your friend, right? Not exactly. Everyone is different, so don’t rely on simply knowing the same people to make a profound connection- reach out as yourself. Friends-of-fans is good for ads, but bad for connections.
Work friends. Know those embarrassing moments people love to post on your wall? Keep your work and home life separate, and avoid the water cooler drama.
Common interest friends. Like friends of friends, relying on simply enjoying the same things is a weak connection.
Spam. No explanation needed.

My top 5 reasons to delete people is different:

Constantly posting obnoxious things. You’re often connected to family, you don’t want the potty mouths to make them question your associations. Warn them first, then delete constant offenders.
Sharing inappropriate/ offensive content like pornography or “shock” images. Same as above, except no second chances.
Troublemakers. Nix those who always argue and start problems.
No longer friends / an ex. Some people aren’t malicious; others are. Don’t take the chance of them airing some dirty laundry for everyone to see.
Only sending game requests. No thanks! I want friends who contribute instead of wasting time.

Sometimes it’s not even personal, you just have too many friends and need to cull the herd. According to Dunbar’s number, we can only remember around 150 meaningful relationships, so there’s no need for this many friends. If you’re popular, make a dedicated Facebook page. These have no audience limit, and you’re able to run microtargeted ads to your posts, growing your audience.

What’s your top 5 reasons to defriend someone?

Have you seen the new video ad unit on Facebook?

May 10, 2014 By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Have you noticed videos automatically playing in your Facebook newsfeed lately? Ryan Carter from Parachute Media has, and was so excited, he shared his thoughts.

Over the past week, he counted the number of different types of content in his feed. On average, 26 out of 30 posts were videos uploaded to FB that auto-play.

“Is Facebook trying something new out? Seems like the average is higher in the evenings than the mornings. It’s not directly from brands but friends sharing them.”

Facebook started testing autoplay videos back in September 2013. Scroll over a video in your newsfeed and it would start playing without sound. Simply click / tap for audio.

Then in December, they rolled out an ad format to support videos.

Before this feature, photos were the king of engagement. But Facebook’s data now shows a 10% increase in likes and shares on videos since implementing auto-play.

Mind that not all brands have the means to create awesome media, and not all users will sit through playback.

They certainly caught the attention of Ryan Carter, a social media strategist in Nashville, TN:

It looks great! I watched each one of them because the first one is short and a teaser. Then you slide over and watch the next two that are recaps of last season of night shift I think. Never seen it but it grabbed my attention. Opens my eyes to new ways of telling a story on Facebook. I’ve never heard of Night Shift but I watched each video! It sucks you in, like clicking play on the next recommended video on YouTube.

Facebook is making heavy investments in mobile ads, like we saw at F8 last week.

Have you promoted any videos lately?

Are you seeing increased engagement?

Yes, you can now say “Facebook” in your ads again!

May 8, 2014 By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

It used to be that anything mentioning Facebook, whether in text or image, got immediately rejected as an ad.

So we had to “How we got killer social engagement” instead of “15 ways to drive leads via Facebook ads”.

Anyone who does Facebook ads for a living can rejoice.

An early Friday to you!

If you’re a real pro, you’d leverage the new workplace targeting on Facebook employees, so they know you’re a big deal.

Of course, you’d have to narrow down to folks who live within 25 miles of Menlo Park, since there are 40,000 folks who claim to work at Facebook via their profiles.

Now when will we be able to promote G+ pages?

Meanwhile, there’s this: