Marketing with Facebook – How to Build a Social Media Following

Facebook is the world’s most popular social platform. Unlike Twitter, Facebook gives you the freedom to post long pieces of text alongside creatives in order to reach and engage with your core audience. Social media marketing on Facebook generally works well for small businesses and CPG/Retail clients, but is less effective for B2B businesses. There are many benefits to social media marketing with Facebook, but for all of these benefits to manifest you’ll first need to develop a loyal Facebook following.

Let’s review the basics of creating a Facebook campaign and how to make the most out of your marketing budget to maintain steady growth.

Facebook for Business – Building your Campaign

Facebook offers 10 objectives for which you’ll build your campaign around. All of these are viable campaigns, but the most common ones that you’ll use include “Promote your Page” and “Boost your posts.” These two campaigns will increase your Page Likes and boost your post engagement, respectively. These two metrics are particularly useful for Facebook because this social media platform is excellent at building a relationship with your core audience. Even if your core metric is conversion and sales, you’ll need to establish a sizeable fan base before your campaigns start to bear fruit.

For the purposes of this post, we will focus on what Facebook does best: generating new fans and promoting engagement with existing followers.

Facebook’s Advertising Hierarchy

Facebook’s advertising hierarchy follows the structure “Campaign –> Ad Sets –> Ads.” These categories serve different testing purposes: 

Campaign – Specifies the Objective

The purpose of this division is to track your different KPI’s for multiple campaigns. These KPI’s can include:

• Building Likes (number of gained followers on the page)
• Promoting Reach (amount of impressions generated for your posts)
• Increasing Engagement (amount of likes, comments, clicks and shares on your posts)

Ad Sets – Identifies your target audience

Within a campaign, your multiple ad sets will target different market segments. These segments are variable by gender, age, interest, or demographic.

• e.g. “Males ages 18-25 in Vancouver who like Wrestling”
• e.g. “Women ages 26-35 in Seattle who like Karate”

Ads – Specifies the Creative and Copy for A/B Testing

Within a market segment, your ads will often change for ongoing A/B testing. You can test the creative (image) of an ad, or the copy (text) of an ad.

With this hierarchy in mind, you can now structure your social media marketing campaign!

Here’s how it works:

Let’s assume that you’re trying to promote a new line of clothing, quality made for athletes that sweat a lot. Your point of differentiation is that your product “moves with the body” and “wicks the sweat out of your system.” You’ve identified 2 primary target markets: Wrestlers and Joggers. While your Jogging products are universal, you have Kids and Adult sizes for wrestling products. You’ve created a new Facebook group and got 50 people to Like your page, 45 of which are friends and family. Now what?

Using Facebook for Business, you can create a “Promote Your Page” campaign with the objective of increasing Page Likes. You can now create a number of ad sets that may include the following:

• MW – 13-18 – Wrestler (All wrestlers ages 13-18)
• MW – 18-35 – Wrestler (All wrestlers ages 18-35)
• M – 18-35 – Jogging – Vancouver (All male joggers in Vancouver)
• W – 18-35 – Jogging – Vancouver (All female joggers in Vancouver)

You can create as many segments as you’d like. Here we listed 4 possible choices: the Wrestler market was segmented by Age, while the Jogging market was segmented by Gender. You could further segment these groups as you’d like, depending on your product.

Now-within these groups, you are going to create multiple ads. Let’s take the W-18-35-Wrestler group, for example. You can create 4 different ads just for this one group:

• Image: Sports Bra. Creative: “We create awesome products that move with your body!”
• Image: Sports Bra. Creative: “We create awesome products that keep you dry and feeling great!”
• Image: Sports Spats. Creative: “We create awesome products that move with your body!”
• Image: Sports Spats. Creative: “We create awesome products that keep you dry and feeling great!”

You can have up to 50 ads in an ad set. This allows you to test the effectiveness of specific words, such as replacing “awesome products” with “cool products” or “awesome clothing.”

A/B Testing Your Facebook Ads

Once everything is in place, you can begin running your campaign. You’ll notice within the first few days that certain ads outperform others-you can turn off ads that perform poorly in favor of higher-performing ads. Is an entire ad set performing better than another one? You can adjust the budget or turn off ad sets to your liking.

The primary metric to view the success of a Page Promotion campaign is Cost per Like. This metric determines whether or not you should keep or update an ad or ad set. If you notice that an ad is starting to generate a higher Cost per Like, it means that it’s starting to stagnate and that you need new creatives or copy.

Every single day, you’ll turn off, turn on or replace your pool of ads in pursuit of the lowest Cost per Like. Keep A/B testing on an ongoing basis to maximize the impact of your marketing expenditures.

Let’s say you started off with an average Cost per Like of $0.80. With $100, you gain 125 new Likes on the page.

After A/B testing for a week, you’ve lowered your Cost per Like down to $0.60. With $100, you now gain 167 new likes on the page. That’s a 33% increase!

By keeping your Cost per Like at a minimum, you’ll slowly start to build your Page Likes with your existing marketing budget. As your page grows organically, your campaign will also become cheaper to run. This process of gaining traction is tedious and requires a lot of maintenance, but trust us when we say that it’s well worth it in the long run!

We hope you’ve gained a better understanding of how Facebook campaigns are organized. If you need any assistance on setting up or managing your campaign – give us a call or contact our agency in downtown Vancouver. We always have chocolate.