The New Facebook Ad Campaign Structure: Here is What You Need to Know

Last week, Facebook announced the redesign and launch of a new structure for its advertising campaigns. This new structure is scheduled to start rolling out tomorrow (March 4) to all ad platforms, including Power Editor.

In this short but sweet post, we’ll take a look at what those changes are, so you can be prepared.

Lately, Facebook has been making several changes to its advertising products, mostly to simplify things, in other words, to eliminate things. But in this case, it looks like we are adding something new to the mix.

Here is the diagram published by Facebook itself last week and, as you can see, there is a new element called Ad Set, and this changes how campaigns are structured.


So here is how the new campaign structure works:

Campaign

You start by setting up a campaign based on one specific Objective. You probably remember that, not too long ago, Facebook changed “Ad Types” for “Objectives” with the purpose of letting marketers focus on the goal of the campaign instead of the type of ad.

This means that the campaign will now be determined by that goal. To give you an example, a campaign can be designed specifically to drive traffic to your site. Everything inside this campaign will be focused on that goal.

If you have been running Facebook ads for a while, you know Objectives were part of the Ad settings.



Also, Facebook didn’t mention any changes to the actual set of Objectives, which at the moment are: Page Post Engagement, Pages Likes, Clicks to Website, Website Conversions, App Installs, App Engagement, Event Responses, and Offer Claims.

Ad Set

This is the layer that has been added to the structure. You can set up multiple ad sets within a campaign.

Ad sets will help you assign different budgets and schedules, but most importantly, you will be able to segment your campaign into different target audiences and measure the results independently.

Ads

Just like Ad Sets, you can create multiple ads inside them. At this level, you will control the actual content of the unit, in other words, you can create ads with different images, links and copy.
You will still be able to customize the bidding for each ad unit.

Existing Campaigns

One more thing to consider is that, existing campaigns will be automatically migrated to the new structure, but their delivery and spending will not be affected.

Quick Recap

In short…

• The Campaign controls the Objective
• Ad Sets will control the budgets, schedule and target audiences
• Ads will carry the content (Images, copy, links)

I personally think that, while it feels like a bit more work, it is a better organization that will also be translated into better reporting.

What do you think?

Why Social Media Is A Must For Your Business

For a long time, social media sites were only perceived as places where young people could stay in contact with one another: somewhere they could share their thoughts, photos and videos with their friends. Sites like Myspace and Bebo helped users connect with new people and keep in touch with their friends online, while also giving them a platform to express themselves.

After a few years at the top, however, Myspace and Bebo were replaced by new kid on the block Facebook. Facebook, a site designed so that Ivy League college students could create a profile and exchange messages, has become something far greater than its humble origins. Companies and brands quickly realised that they could set up their own profiles, just like the college students, allowing them to connect with Facebook’s millions of users. In 2007, only a year after Facebook went public, there were over 100,000 business pages on the site.

Now, Facebook has over 1 billion users and millions of company and brand pages. The site’s huge membership figures give companies a present and active audience, one they can reach and engage with promotions, and even interact with easily. Companies can use Facebook to keep fans and customers up-to-date with new products, or even to run competitions and contests.

There are a number of other social media sites that provide businesses with fantastic marketing opportunities. Twitter, for example, is where the conversation happens. Twitter’s 200 million users access the site to talk about what they are doing and current topics of interest. Businesses can use Twitter to see what people are talking about and even what people are saying about their brand.

Picture sharing sites like Pinterest and Flickr give businesses a place to showcase their work with eye-catching images, while video sharing sites like YouTube help companies reach the public with viral video adverts. Google+, Google’s answer to Facebook, provides a very similar service to Facebook, but with a focus on building interest-based communities.

Over the last two years, social media has moved onto mobile devices. With apps like Instagram, Vine and Facebook Mobile, people can stay constantly connected to their social media profiles. Meanwhile, with geotargeting social media networks like Foursquare, and similar services on Google and Facebook, local businesses can even find customers nearby and target them with advertising.

In fact, thanks to the reams and reams of personal information users put on social media accounts, businesses can target their ideal customers with adverts.

Social media has become one of the most powerful tools in a business’ arsenal, providing them with a low-cost platform for advertising and marketing, an enormous and targeted audience, a place where they can keep up-to-date with all the headlines and breaking news, a stage on which to release and promote new products, and a forum to speak to customers and monitor the conversation.

How do you use social media to help your business?

Social Media Promotions Of The Week: 17/05/2013

Every social media promotion in this week’s SMPW has a video: two use a video alongside a larger campaign while one makes clever use of YouTube’s features. In fact, YouTube itself has a promotion out this week for an event they’re holding very soon. Here are the top five:

1. P&G – ‘Thank You Mum’



During the London Olympics last year, consumer goods company Proctor & Gamble ran a very successful campaign encouraging everyone to thank their mums. To celebrate global Mother’s Day on Sunday (though not in the UK), P&G are rereleasing their “Thank you Mum” campaign, starting off with an uplifting video about Maria Shriver and her mother Eunice – the founder of the Special Olympics.

To help promote the video, P&G are promising to donate $1 to the Special Olympics on their Facebook page every time the video is shared, until $50,000 has been donated. At the time of writing the video has been shared over 43,000 times.

To coincide with the campaign, people can tweet motherly advice on Twitter using the hashtag #MomsWisdom.

2. BNP Paribas – #TweetandShoot


To celebrate a successful 40 year partnership with the French Open, BNP Paribas are inviting tennis fans to compete with French tennis ace Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in a Twitter-powered tennis game.

On 23 May, Twitter users will be able to position a ball on a virtual court to aim their shot. The shot will then be encoded into a tweet with the hashtag #TweetandShoot, decoded by a tennis ball machine connected to the internet, then fired into the area of the court the user chose.

Each tweet will be selected at random and then fired at Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who will have to keep his wits about him if he wants to return as many of the randomly processed shots as possible.

3. Volkswagen – Hidden Frame


Volkswagen Brazil has made clever use of YouTube’s pop-up frame preview feature in their new YouTube advert.

Viewers are asked to hover their cursor at a certain point along the videos time line in order to warn the actor talking to the camera of a falling man.

The video advert has been released to promote Volkswagen’s new side assist feature, which helps drivers see objects in the side mirror’s blind spot.

4. UEFA – The Race


On Wednesday, Chelsea F.C. defeated S.L. Benfica in a hard-fought Europa League final. In the run up to the match, European football governing body UEFA decided to challenge two groups of fans – one group Portuguese and one group English – to a race to the Amsterdam Arena where the final was held.

The fans had to display passing, dribbling and technical skill to progress through the various stages of the race, with the S.L. Benfica fans getting their hands on the trophy first. The Race proved not to be a sign of things to come, however, with Bratislav Ivanovic’s injury time goal earning Chelsea the trophy on the night.

5. YouTube – Arnold Pumps You Up For Comedy Week


Next week is YouTube Comedy Week: a seven day long event during which YouTube’s stars will release videos showing the best that they have to offer.

Acts such as The Lonely Island, College Humor, Vince Vaughn, Epic Meal Time and Epic Rap Battles of History will be involved in Comedy Week. The videos will be a variety of skits, live streams and “fan challenges”.

Which is your favourite social media promotion this week?  

SeeItShopIt, The First Ever Interactive Facebook Shop

Modern communications agency network Isobar has launched SeeItShopIt, the first ever interactive shop within the Facebook news feed. UK-based clothing retailer Littlewoods has become the first brand to use the SeeItShopIt interactive catalogue feature on their Facebook page to advertise Myleene Klass’ new summer swimwear collection.

A post announcing the launch of the swimwear range appeared on the Littlewoods Facebook page late last month, as well as on the news feeds of Littlewoods’ fans. The post, which utilised SeeItShopIt, appears at first glance to be a video post, with a static image overlaid by a play triangle symbol.

Clicking on the play symbol opens up an interactive catalogue consisting of three columns. The first column shows all the items in the swimsuit range in a down-scrolling photo gallery. hovering the mouse at the bottom or the top of this column will make it scroll downwards or upwards respectively. Clicking on an image will open it into the middle column, which shows a larger version of whichever item has been selected.

Clicking on the middle column will enlarge the product image so that it spreads across all three columns. Again, hovering the mouse at the top and bottom of the image will scroll it – the image is fitted width-ways, so is too tall for the original box. The third and final column on the right contains a description of the product, a price, and a share button. Beside the share button is a link to the product page on the Littlewoods site.

Gary Williams, Littlewoods retail director, explained the company’s choice to use the new tool:

Littlewoods always looks to be leading customer experiences, whether online or offline. The SeeItShopIt tool gives us the ability to deliver a new way for our Facebook fans to connect with our products. For the first time, users can share individual items, browse through collections and navigate straight to product pages via the Facebook news feed. If Littlewoods successfully monetises their Facebook page using SeeItShopIt, earning revenue from their Facebook fan base directly on the site, then other brands will follow suit.

According to Isobar’s CTO, Rick Williams:

We created SeeItShopIt to deliver an interactive shopping experience directly within Facebook‚s news feed, where users spend most of their time. The tool will allow any brand with a broad product portfolio to monetise their Facebook fan base by providing a seamless shopping experience.

 Have you had a look at SeeItShopIt on the Littlewoods Facebook page? What do you think?    

Twitter Adds New Services To Ads Self-Service Platform

Twitter has made huge improvements to its self-service platform for America-based Twitter advertisers, the microblogging site announced on its advertising blog yesterday. Twitter advertisers with access to the self-service platform now have new targeting options and access to Twitter’s advanced interface.


On Twitter’s self-service ads platform, businesses can pay to promote accounts and tweets, as well as view analytics showing how successful their promotions are. Advertisers must first be invited by Twitter to use the platform, then they can choose a location and a target audience, targeting by interests. Advertisers have to set a daily spending limit and will only be charged for what works.

Since yesterday, advertisers with access to the platform have had more detailed targeting options and access the advanced interface. According to the advertising blog, Twitter made the changes after listening to feedback from users:

As we listened to feedback, two requests kept coming up: marketers wanted access to more robust targeting tools, as well as a pathway to all the bells and whistles of our advanced interface if they desired it.

Self-service advertisers are now given two options when targeting Twitter users by interest: firstly, they can target users with similar interests to the followers of a specific Twitter handle. For example, if a camera manufacturer wanted to target amateur photographers, it could choose to promote tweets and accounts on the pages of people with similar interest to those who followed @PhotoMonthly or @LATimesPhotos.


Secondly, advertisers now have a list of over 350 different options to choose from when selecting which interests to target, from car racing, to birdwatching, to golf.

Advertisers can also specify on which devices their adverts will appear, choosing from a list of five tick-box options: desktop, iOS, Android, Blackberry and other mobile devices. This new feature is particularly helpful for app developers who create platform-specific applications: for example, the developer of an Android-only app can target Twitter uses solely on Android devices.

There is now the option to target a specific gender with advertising. Twitter extrapolates a user’s gender based on public user signals, surmising whether a user is male or female based on their activity on Twitter. A group of human testers discovered the system to be 90% accurate.


Twitter has made its advanced interface available to self-service advertisers, although they only advise more experienced advertisers to use it:

Self-service advertisers who are more experienced with online advertising can now choose to use our advanced interface’s deeper campaign controls, detailed reporting and analytics, and multi-campaign optimization, which help them run more complex campaigns and optimize in real time. The pricing remains the same, and you can start and stop campaigns at any time in both interfaces.

Advertisers new to the platform will be given the option to use the advanced interface after they have signed in, set up a promotion and entered their billing information. For advertisers who are already signed on, a link entitled “Switch to Advanced” will appear at the top of their dashboard after they have logged in.

Although the self-service ads platform is only available to stateside companies at the moment, and even then only by invitation, international advertisers should be given access later this year.

Have you used Twitter’s self-service platform? What are the improvements like?

Twitter Is Updating Its API Metadata To Help Developers Filter Tweets By Language And Importance

Twitter developer Arne Roomann-Kurrik has announced on theTwitter blog that the social media micro-messaging service is introducing new metadata to tweets in order to help developers “work with targeted subsets of Tweet collections”.

The improvements will help Twitter app developers filter and organise tweets by the language that they were written in an identify tweets that Twitter considers “high” value.

The language that the tweet has been written in is identified by Twitter’s machine language detection algorithms and marked by a new lang attribute in the metadata. “The values will be valid BCP 47 language identifiers,” says Roomann-Kurrik, “and may represent any of the languages listed on Twitter's advanced search page, or "und" if no language could be detected.”

This language update allows systems that compile and organise Twitter data, “such as analytics services or real-time search streams, to offer language-specific curation, aggregation and analysis of Tweet content.”

The filter_level attribute values Tweets from a stream as either "none", "low", or "medium", with a final classification, "high", to be introduced later. “The "medium" (and eventually "high") entries will roughly correlate to the "Top Tweets" results for searches on twitter.com”. This classification system will make it easier for apps to surface high-value tweets and other content from “noisy” feeds.

Both filter_level and lang will be available on Streaming API responses, with the latter also on REST.filter_level will be activated first, on Wednesday next week, with lang coming shortly after. However, the release times are subject to change, so Roomann-Kurrik advises that developers keep an eye on the calendar of API changes.

Here is an example of the new attributes present in metadata:


In the example above, the tweet is given a classification of "medium", meaning it is a quite high-value result in the search, and the language is English, as specified by “en”.

Public streaming endpoints will also support the filter_level and lang parameters, providing filtering of streamed data on Twitter’s side of the process. Users can connect to a public stream and specify the languages of the tweets that their search will return, as well as setting a filter_level parameter. 

At some point, Twitter will undoubtedly introduce the changes into the Discovery tab. However, there is the possibility that, instead of being organised chronologically, Twitter’s default home stream could be organised in order of value to the user. 

Would you like to see your Twitter stream organised by importance? 

5 Ways To Gain & Keep Your Customers Trust Online

Now more then ever, organizations are opening up to the public and becoming transparent due to the impact and evolution of social media. Social media has forced small and large organizations to join in on the conversations that people are having about their brands. If you want to continue growing your business and its brand then you need to gain trust from your customers immediately. Below I listed 5 simple ways to keep and gain your customers trust in an online environment.

1. Be consistent with all of your branding. In order to keep and gain trust you need to keep a consistent branding strategy across all of your platforms on and offline. What this does is shows your prospects and consumers that you are consistent and clearly portrays who you are, everywhere, all the time. Something to keep in mind is the consistent branding all the way down to the simplest things such as consistent color schemes. These color schemes should be followed through from your website all the way through to your business cards and letter head. Being consistent tells your customers that “this is who you are all the time, with no smoke or illusions”.
2. Let a personality show through. People trust, and buy, from people. This is the reason its important to let a person, or at least your businesses personality, shine through in your online presence. Especially in your businesses social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Be you and tell your story, you may surprise yourself how people will react to this if you are used to hiding behind the curtain and letting only your business speak.
3. Respond to comments and reviews both negative and positive. I have many conversations with business owners regarding the conversations that are happening on their social media pages. It is very common for the conversation to go right into the direction of customer reviews. If you are looking to keep your customers trust then leave the customer reviews to the customers and don’t think making a false review for your business will help you. This seems like common sense and basic but I have come across a few instances where employees or business owners themselves feel the need to create false customer reviews about their own business. This can shatter the trust and will dilute any real customer experiences especially good ones. On another note, take both negative and positive reviews as a learning experience and use them to show the public how you handle situations. This over the long run will spotlight your business as positively as possible, and the goal is to have that positive outshine the negative.
4. Capture client testimonials. Create a system where your capturing testimonials from people who use your product and or service. By doing this you are creating a great way for you to gain your future customers trust. In many cases before someone decides to purchase something from you they research your business online and part of that research will be in the form of reading your past testimonials. Don’t just capture the testimonials but make them readily available for your future customers to read and gain trust in your brand before they purchase from you. Post them on all your platforms. Invite people to read about these experiences, so when its time for them to use your company they already are competent in the fact that they made the right decision.
5. Be transparent and authentic. The many social media platforms that are available these days have made it easier then ever to allow your brand to become transparent and authentic. Being transparent enables your customers to see into your company and gain trust on a whole new level. Social media makes this easy by allowing you to respond to whatever issues that your business is having in a public manner for all to see. This will automatically create the sense of authenticity of your brand and will ultimately create the trust your brand and organization is looking for.

Have you gained the trust of your online community yet? What are your tactics towards creating trust in your organization? Are you using social media as a tool to create transparency and put a face behind your company?

New Facebook Profile - An Overview

The social media space is all a buzz about Facebook's latest update.

If you missed the 60 minutes interview with Mark Zuckerberg, there has been a makeover of your Profile page. Everyone is chiming in about what they like and don't like about the changes as well as speculating about the true rationale behind these changes.

According to Facebook, the changes are intended to help people connect by making it easier for Friends to share more about who they are and what they are up to. There is some dispute about this, but more about that later.

I've checked out the new Profile page and reviewed many of the comments. Following is a quick review of the changes and my take on what these changes mean to the small business using Facebook.

The Introductory Profile Snapshot.
The top of the page now includes a snapshot of who you are: where you live, where you work, where you went to school and what important thing you are currently working on. A collection of recently tagged photos also shows what you've been up to lately. (Note: This is automatically populated when you convert to the new Profile page. To change these photos, click on "Photos" under your Profile photo, upload new photos and/or tag yourself in existing ones.)

Navigation

Under your profile picture you will now find:

•Wall
•Info
•Photos
•Friends
The Info section now provides an opportunity to provide more detail about you, what you are doing and what you are interested in. For example, in the Education and Work section, you can add details of an interesting project you are currently working on. Based on your interests and activities, you can provide more info on the sports you play, the movies and books you enjoy and the activities and interests you pursue. You can then connect with Friends that share similar interests and activities.

Photos
There is more emphasis on photos in the new Profile Page. Recently uploaded or tagged photos appear under your profile snapshot so people can get a glimpse of what you've been up to lately.

Friends
The intent here seems to be to facilitate grouping of Friends based on criteria that you find meaningful (i.e. Work, School, Interests etc.)

As far as I can tell, these changes apply only to your personal page - not your business/Fan page - yet.
However, from a business perspective, these changes may provide additional opportunities to advertisers. As Facebook obtains more detailed information about its users, advertisers will be able to better target ads and further refine their messages to appeal to their target audience. Some are speculating that this is the real reason behind the changes.

At a minimum, this change is another signal that Facebook is on the move towards becoming much more than a place we connect with Friends. I think it is safe to say that the future of SEO and search will look very different. Will Facebook lead the way? I'll be watching this space closely and helping to sort things out as developments occur. If you've invested heavily in SEO, it will be important to monitor these trends and make changes in your online strategy accordingly.

Blueprint to Making Money TODAY ..... interested?

"Black Friday" is traditionally a massive discount day in stores
in the US when people go a little spend crazy!!Here is a quick
tip that I used last year on "Black Friday" to
take advantage of the massive amount of buying taking place in
the US today both online and offline!

1. Go to Amazon.com and sign up as an affiliate
2. Open your twitter account(s)
3. Create a link to an ipad or another hot new product for sale
using your affiliate link
4. Write a tweet like "OMG .... the ipad deals for Black Friday
today are CRAZY "put link here""
5. Add the hashtag (#) #blackfriday to the end of your tweet
6. Your tweet will look like this OMG .... the ipad deals for
Black Friday today are CRAZY "put link here" #blackfriday
7. Tweet and retweet across your twitter accounts
8. Watch the sales roll in :)

The beauty of this is that no matter what you promote with your
link, if people buy ANYTHING on amazon after they used your link,
you get a commission!
Remember Amazon is designed to sell so they do all the work!

Sweet right!?!?

Enjoy

Paul & Mili