A tutorial on creating ads in Facebook comparing Power Editor to Facebook's self-serve Ad Manager
Most people I meet on training courses who advertise on Facebook, naturally start with Facebook's Ad manager since they don't know about Power Editor. In this tutorial I will explain the ad creation process using the self serve tool and I'll show you how much better it is with Power Editor.
If you don't know it Facebook's Power Editor is a Chrome application which I'd strongly recommend for anyone creating ads in Facebook. It's pretty essential for big, regular advertisers, but what you may not realise is how many benefits there are even in a single ad.
First: go to the Ads Manager
You'll see something like this. Select "Create Ad".
Step 1: choose your campaign objective
Now compare the approach in Power Editor…
Google+ follows Pinterest with a new 'Collections' feature
Rating: [rating=2]
Recommended Link: Google Official announcement - Introducing Google+ Collections
With this new feature Google+ seems to be following the popular model of Pinterest boards, where posts can be categorised into topics and interests, to share with family and friends on the same basis as the posts.
You can see the example at the head of this post where we grouped some of our infographics and they appear as 'cards' similar to Pinterest. Google explains 'Collections' this way:
"Every collection is a focused set of posts on a particular topic, providing an easy way for you to organize all the things you’re into. Each collection can be shared publicly, privately, or with a custom set of people. Once you create your first collection, your profile will display a new tab where other people can find and…
Using LinkedIn to increase visibility of your content and drive referrals to your website
I've seen lots of case where people aren't really making the most of LinkedIn. Yes, they may use LinkedIn to keep their CV updated and occasionally send a little digital love to colleagues by way of endorsements. But if you are working in social media, content marketing, or simply trying to get more interest in your company’s activities, there are a lot of simple things you can do on LinkedIn that will take seconds but should increase traction for you. LinkedIn changes its features regularly, for example it recently had a homepage redesign. So, if you haven't looked at some of these new features I'll cover in this post it could be worth a refresh, or even a 'spring clean'!
LinkedIn Status Updates
Most people are aware that you can create a little update on LinkedIn pretty much like you…
Newsfeed algorithm changes which could affect the number of organic site referral visits you get from Facebook in future
Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook Official Newsfeed FYI post from 21 April 2015
We're alerting Smart Insights readers to this change to personalisation of the Facebook newsfeed algorithm since it could potentially affect the volume of referrals that your site gets from Facebook if you're not posting the right type of content or at the right frequency.
In their announcement of the change Facebook explain that their algorithm aims to...
"give you the right mix of updates from friends and public figures, publishers, businesses and local organizations you are connected to.
This balance is different for everyone depending on what people are most interested in learning about every day. As more people and pages are sharing more content, we need to keep improving…
Our round-up of examples of who is using Twitter's Periscope video streaming so far
Since Twitter launched the Periscope app in March, we've been discussing its potential and early use in this discussion on our LinkedIn group. We're still working it out, so were interested to hear members' views on how it could be used and ask if it's going to be a fad, perhaps like Twitter Vine - was that a fad?, or a more significant marketing tool.
I think it's fair to say there are mixed views; scepticism that it's not professional video streaming and will lead to clips of tea making and mundane tasks through to marketing opportunities for professional video service companies to step-in and show how it should be done! Others are excited about the benefits of live streaming for behind the scene stories with fashion brands and…
Insights and examples of how the top 500 UK and US corporates integrating social media into their corporate comms strategy
This extensive research from Investis is positioned as one of the first reports to showcase how large companies in the UK and US are using social media specifically for corporate communications. We're recommending it to readers since it provides case studies and visual examples of how these public corporates are using the 8 main social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare and Pinterest), for corporate communications. Companies are scored to an index and the top 100 companies are ranked, with exploratory comments on best practice tactics.
It shows that there has been a rise in the FTSE 100 companies linking their corporate websites to social media from 35% three years ago to 72% today, and a rise of US SEP 100 linked companies from 61% to 89%.
There are some interesting…
Balancing the 4 ways to use LinkedIn for Business
A blurring of the lines is taking place - where once there was clarity, confusion now reigns; uncertainty has replaced certainty and as we sit in front of our online devices, we pause, concerned that our next press of the key may present us with a problem, a problem that sees us potentially offending the very people we want to do business with!
LinkedIn is evolving and unless you evolve with it, you may well end up damaging your brand reputation and your business will suffer.
Ok, this may present a slightly over the top view of the challenge I want to talk about, but please hear me out.
With more than 300 million people registered as members of LinkedIn, it's unsurprising that some will, on occasions, get the…
Stay up-to-date with Facebook marketing
During the first part of 2015, Facebook has started rolling some small and large newsfeed changes. On the one hand, most of these changes benefit users and help them filter, prioritize and consume their newsfeeds, but on the other hand this means more companies, like our venture, investing more money in advertising trying to keep their social traffic near the goal, and to avoid getting lost in the Facebook content limbo.
Facebook's views on organic reach declining
The latest change involves the drop in company page 'likes', which I believe is the right move, since they will remove deactivated and memorialized accounts. In their words, they will discard users whom we cannot expect them to interact with our brand. What worried Page / Community Managers the most was the organic reach drop during the second week of February, and…
Is it best to boost a Facebook post, create an ad using the post or create a separate ad that's not in newsfeed?
I used to strongly advise clients against “boosting” posts on Facebook. It’s not that I’m generally against paying Facebook for reach (although of course a little more free reach would be nice), it’s just that boosting used to be the sloppy, non targeted way that the newbies and amateurs used. It cost them more money, got them fans they’d probably prefer to avoid and whilst quick and simple, wasn’t very clever.
So back in the day, I used to recommend going into the Ad Manager or Power Editor, and creating an ad using the organic post as the source but promoting it rather than boosting it. You got far more targeting control and consequently…
Facebook's Power Editor ads platform is certainly not for the faint hearted, but once you're confident with it, it's unlikely you'll return to the native "self serve" ad platform.
I've used Facebook's Power Editor for ads for several years now, and went through the pain barrier because, back in the day, it was the only way to surface really good sized newsfeed ads (using the now virtually defunct "dark post" function). As with many things Power Editor, this and other features has been rolled out onto the self serve platform, but there are still good reasons to be using Power Editor.
Here's a compilation of reasons to use Power Editor. As with all things Facebook, functionality changes on a near daily basis so please do correct me if I've missed something:
16 reasons to use Power Editor when creating Facebook ads
New features are rolled…
