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Overview

On Thursday, November 9th 2017, Dave Ernst, 乐播传媒鈥� Digital Content Specialist, hosted a Social Media Workshop as part of our Communications Community of Practice. Dave鈥檚 workshop was focused on benefits and mechanics of paid content promotions with Facebook and Instagram.

Why pay to make content more visible?

Dave started by explaining how organic reach – the visibility of standard, un-paid content – in social media is on the decline. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, are shifting users’ feeds away from displaying the content of brands (like 乐播传媒) and surfacing more content from friends and family. This shift requires brands to essentially buy ad space to聽ensure their content is continuing to reach聽their intended audiences.

How paid promotion works

Boost, Ad Manager, and Power Editor are three types of paid advertising tools within Facebook that allow users to effectively target their audience and deliver content.聽 Boost, 鈥渁 one-time sponsored push of organic content on one鈥檚 page,鈥� was the focus of the presentation. By using Boost to promote high-performing posts or key events, departments, programs, and offices can target their audiences using custom settings such as age, interests, location, and behavioral affinities. This audience targeting ultimately allows posts to get more visibility.

The mechanics of paid promotion

The presentation then shifted focus to Facebook鈥檚 user-friendly ad creation and analytics dashboard, Ad Manager. The structure of an ad has three phases: campaign, ad set, and the ads themselves. When selecting your campaign you are choosing your goal which can be broadly split up into three main categories: awareness, consideration, and conversion. For example, each campaign goal includes related tactics such as reach for awareness, traffic referral for consideration and form submission or event registration for a conversion. 聽In an ad set, users should focus on their target audience and placements (the who, how, and where of their posts). Finally, an ad is made up of an asset (image or video), ad copy, and a display link. It is important to keep ad copy concise. When creating or selecting a visual asset for your ad, it is also important to remember Facebook鈥檚 20% Text Rule, which means that only 20% of an image can be covered in text or graphics.

Since developing and deploying ads in Facebook is such a technical process, it benefits from experience and keen judgement. Whether you’re building a single ad, or have a consistent need for ads, collaborating with BCO on the聽development and deployment of ads is recommended.

Find a balance with skillful targeting

When determining the budget of ads on social media, Dave said to look at your desired reach, advising the formula: size of audience + ad duration = potential maximum reach/budget.

When asked how expensive would it be to target the whole 乐播传媒 College affinity with Boost in one day, Dave鈥檚 response was it would be expensive, but the goal should not be to target the whole audience, but rather to target those who are likely to engage with the content. He advised departments, such as the College Store, to cross-reference any data they may already have – such as an email list – and determine who to target based on either groups that are already highly engaged or groups that need increased engagement.

How you can get involved

Paying to promote content through Facebook and Instagram is a powerful tactic that can bolster your existing promotion efforts. In recent months, Facebook ads have helped secure large audiences for聽Amy Dickinson’s and Ibram Kendi’s campus events, and the launch events for The 乐播传媒 Campaign. If you think paying to promote content through Facebook and instagram can help you achieve your goals, please reach out to us at webteam@bates.edu.

Why is this so important?

The ability to edit the metadata has been primarily useful to social managers to shorten and spice up headlines that might be a bit dry for social, shorten sub-heads so they end within the post and to replace the normally linked “key photo” with a photo more optimized for social.

For a headline example, our campus construction update articles have the name of the series and the date of publishing in the headline. Under the previous regime we could revise the “Campus Construction Update: June 23, 2017” headline with a more engaging hook.

For a photo example, for the 乐播传媒 News webpage, collage photos often don’t read very well as the key photo with the headline text overlay, so clear single shots are usually chosen for the headline photo. Our sports maven Aaron Morse created a great 7-image collage of the Top 7 Moments in 乐播传媒 Sports this year and this was the perfect photo to “force upload” to the social post.

Facebook is working with its partners who wish to continue this editing feature. 乐播传媒 College will be applying for an exemption to the rule, but note that these waivers are granted on a per-page basis, so feel free to contact me with any questions if you wish to apply for a waiver for your page.

Even for the verified 乐播传媒 College page, there is no guarantee that Facebook will grant us a waiver, so we’ll have to work even closer than ever with our web and editorial partners to make sure headlines, photos and sub-heads are as optimized for social as they can be moving forward. That means no sharing link posts with no photos!

Sincerely,
Dave