For businesses trying to generate leads on Facebook, learning the different options is essential. Especially since posts from business pages are rarely displayed in your follower’s time line if they are not promoted. For businesses to gain visibility on Facebook, they must spend money. When I first started advertising on Facebook, I (admittedly) thought it would be straightforward and easy. Science behind it? Smh. While Facebook seems to constantly tweak their platform, the basic three methods remain the same (for now):
- Boosting (Beginner)
- Ads Manager (Advanced)
- Business Manager (Expert)
To utilize the information in this post you should already have a well-optimized Facebook Business page and have permission levels of Advertiser or higher.
POST BOOSTING
This is the easiest way to promote your content. Your posts can be done directly from your page and it is fairly straightforward.
- Audience: Any audiences you’ve created and saved will appear. You may also create a new audience and specify by gender, age, location, and interests. The interest targeting is limited compared to what is available on Ads Manager or Business Manager.
- Interest Targeting via Post Boosting
- Budget and Duration: Adding a budget and selecting a duration of 1, 7 or 14 days will quickly give you an estimated reach.
- Some posts work better than others. This will vary from business to business. Some audiences prefer pictures while others interact more with technical information. It is important to know which posts work best for your audience.
- Payment: You can select a payment method or change the existing one.
Boosting posts directly from your page is quick and easy and optimal for sharing status updates. If you are looking to capture more leads, increase brand awareness, sell more tickets or drive traffic to your website, I recommend delving into Ads Manager.
ADS MANAGER
Once you begin to create ads you will need to stay on top of how they are performing and how much money you are spending. You can do this from Ads Manager. It keeps everything in one place allowing you to fine tune your campaigns, see which ads are working well, and keep track of your spending.
Using Ads Manager allows you to be a bit more creative with your Ad copy. From Ads Manager, you can choose from a single image/video or multiple images in one ad. You may also use multiple images to create a slideshow.
Everything starts at the Campaign level, and within each campaign you define your targets, and within each target, you design and test. A quick analogy is to think of it as one of those cheesecake samplers – the one that comes with eight slices and two of each flavor. With the cheesecake wheel representing the Ad set for your target audience, the different flavors become your design and testing. You’ll quickly see which “flavor” appeals most to your audience and, thus, performs better.
Power Editor
There is quite a big difference when using the Power Editor within Ads Manager. Quite simply, using Power Editor gives you more options and allows for deeper targeting.
Creating Ads within Ads Manager, Power Editor or Business Manager opens up the targeting possibilities.
BUSINESS MANAGER
If you are going to have many different ad campaigns running at the same time, want to equitably share the accountability across your organization, grant different agencies access, or pay for some ads from a different source, then you should consider using Business Manager. Business Manager is ideal for agencies and organizations managing more than one Facebook page or Ad account. However, be sure to carefully review Facebook’s setup guide, because once you claim an asset (Page, Ad Account, App) inside Business Manger, it cannot be undone.
Claim Your Own, Request Others
Only, only claim those assets (Facebook pages, ad accounts, or applications) that you expressly own. Once an asset has been claimed within Business Manager it cannot be changed. So you don’t want to claim a client’s page, instead, you may request access to it. Let your client decide if they want to use Business Manager. If they decide otherwise, you will still be able to manage the account.
Facebook has done a great job at publishing setup guides and webinars to train and update users on how to use Business Manager.
