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Facebook account management best practices

Account Structure introduction

Facebook advertising is still more labour intensive than search advertising due to its limited platform functionality and interface. Therefore, it is imperative that ‘account structure best practice’ is adhered to in order to maintain control, improve efficiencies, increase ad effectiveness, and make sure anyone who takes over the account can get a grasp of the account hierarchy quickly and easily.

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Campaigns are the second tier that sits under the ‘account’ level. It’s at the campaign level that ads are held and daily budgets are assigned.

Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creatives, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it is best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads, as it makes reporting, analysis and managing budgets much easier.

facebook account structure

Following reports over Limited Run’s Facebook ad tests and their need to spend a minimum advertising budget of $2,000 a month in order to change their Facebook page name from Limited Pressing to Limited Run, we’ve been getting many inquiries from our clients.

We contacted Facebook and a spokesperson for the social network responded with the following:

According to Facebook, users upload more than 300 million photos, generate over 3.2 billion ‘likes’/'comments’, and have 526 million active users on average per day. But do we stop to think about where our information is being shared and what happens after an image or a post has been uploaded? To show users just how easy it is to access user’s status updates and share it to the world, 18 year old Callum Haywood set up a website called ‘We Know What You’re Doing‘, pulling public status updates via Facebook’s Graph API that contain references to hating your boss, getting drunk, using drugs and changes to your personal phone numbers. The site created a massive media stir with questions being asked once again about online safety on social networks. We caught up with Callum to find out more about the man behind the website, and to ask what inspired him to set up the site as well as what users can do to ensure online safety.

Callum Haywood

Hey Callum, firstly, congratulations on your experiment, it’s gotten you worldwide recognition; did you ever envision that this project would get you this much media attention? Thank you, I had never envisioned that the site would get anywhere close to the number of visitors it has had in its entire online life. I had certainly not expected the media to pick up on it.

Could you tell us a little bit about your career background and how and when you got into coding and web development? I’ve recently finished my A level studies, and will be starting university later this year. I started coding when I was about 13 years old, just learning basic HTML out of an old book. I then got into web design using CSS, and this lead me onto PHP which is what the site is written in.

What inspired you to set up “We know what you’re doing?” Two things inspired me. First was Tom Scott’s video “I Know What You Did Five Minutes Ago” in which he demonstrates, using live data, the amount of personal information that people put online. Secondly is the simplicity in which this information can be obtained; within a few lines of code you can query Facebook’s Graph API for public posts and output them.

Lately, you might have noticed Google’s aggressive and frequent product announcements. With so much going on at Google during the past few weeks such as Google’s Penguin algorithm update, the Google Plus iPhone and Android app redesign, Google’s Knowledge Graph, Google acquiring Motorola Mobility, Google Maps being replaced by Google Plus Local and Google Shopping; it’s become so very hard to keep pace with the changes (or future changes) that are bound to affect SEO and SEM strategies in the near or distant future. Therefore, I thought I’d take a step back and use the Queen’s Jubilee weekend to gauge how all of this will shape your future SEM strategy. Google has always maintained that search is at the heart of everything they do. So it’s safe to assume that all of their major updates, will in some way have an impact on search.

The second day of SMX started with a panelist discussion on social shares, and top tips on how marketers are truly going to be influential.

Here are the top takeaways from the first morning session with more to follow later on today!

Social Shares | New Link Building from @LisaDMyers

  • Rel=Author one of the key factors of Link signals in years to come, mixing in the need of SEO & Social Media
  • If your not there already understand and begin to use Google +, as research has shown a direct correlation for companies having better SERPs because of using G+
  • The end game has not changed in terms of link building, in essence creativity is essential to build great links
  • Examples of short term Social SEO link building: post and publish blogs, articles, breaking news, infographics, competitions and interviews
  • Example of long term Social SEO link building: create a social community, developing a blog, writing white papers and making yourself seem a social authority
  • Understand your target market in making sure they will share your items, relevancy is key
  • Makes the most of what is happening now in the market

Making Waves Not Ripples: Effective Syndicatoin to Drive Social Sharing from @mrjamescarson

Back in December last year I wrote one of my first blog posts for SEOptimise entitled “How you can get over 79 Twitter followers in under 23 minutes – and why not to bother”.

From the title of the post, you can imagine that this post is regarding a similar topic, so you will not be required to do any of the following:

  • Write a ground-breaking blog post announcing how you have revolutionised the world
  • Give away freebies in order to be liked
  • Do any sort of “Like Gating”

like

Over the past decade, as blogging and social media marketing have become increasingly popular, some companies are now even outsourcing their blogs to be written by another agency.

I was surprised the other day when talking to a friend about how they measured the success of their company’s blog, that she mentioned one of their factors was getting more “Facebook Likes”.  At that moment I cringed, but it also gave me inspiration to write this.

Learning Objectives

Today’s post will show you how to get free likes on your blog post, but will also show you that getting 1000 Likes as opposed to 10 makes no real difference. I’ll also show you alternatives to how you can better monitor the success of your blogging campaign.

The real value of internet marketing is in the ease of setting up analytics by communication channel, measuring performance of campaigns and thereby directing/redirecting valuable marketing budget toward campaigns that yield higher return. Therefore, setting clear marketing KPIs is crucial before implementing any online marketing activity.

It must be reiterated that executing marketing campaigns in any channel is a tactic, perhaps one of several tactics that a marketing manager or director might include. Other online and offline channel tactics might include SEO, Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter, email marketing, newspaper and magazine ads, radio and television ads, brochure distribution and leaflet drops etc.. It is important to recognise that Facebook ads is a channel in which we undertake tactics to sell things. Hence, think of your KPIs as what you want to accomplish and the relevant tactics as how you undertake your marketing activities to achieve these KPIs.

New Facebook Page Developments

The ‘new’ timeline layout that Facebook users have recently had to get used to is now being rolled out to Facebook Pages too. Along with new real-time Facebook insights, brands really have an opportunity to develop their Facebook marketing strategy and create added value for users. The new timeline for brands will automatically update to all pages on 30th March 2012. Some innovative brands have already adopted this new layout and are beginning to utilise it to their advantage. I’m going to present some ideas on how you as a brand can take advantage of the new features on your Facebook page.

Let’s look at the new features:

Cover Photo

Brands now have more than a thumbnail image to express their identity. The large cover photo is the first thing that people will see on your page, so it is essential that it represents the brand values. It can’t contain information that references purchases, prices, liking the page, contact information or contain a call to action. Use a strong image that clearly depicts what the brand is about. Harley Davidson have done a great job with their cover photo:  it clearly represents their brand, their iconic bikes and the open road. Another good example is Starbucks Coffee.

Continuing from my previous post, 11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign, I thought I’d share with you some simple yet powerful tactics to outsmart your competitors and reach out to your target audience. Facebook offers some incredible targeting options, so here are my five top tips to get the most out of these features.

#1 Targeting your competitors’ fans

There has never been a more fertile hunting ground for systematically picking off competitors’ customers and fans than Facebook ads. At the time of writing, there are no legal limitations in targeting users who express positive or negative interests in other companies’ protected brands. I doubt that this frontier mentality will last legally; but meanwhile, you can certainly get it while it’s hot!

St. Valentine’s Day has become one of the biggest events in the retail calendar. Second only to Christmas, it is a huge money maker for brands, with 32% of gifts being bought online. In America, it is expected that a whopping $3.5billion will be spent on jewellery alone. Men are the biggest spenders, buying all sorts of gifts for their loved ones, from flowers, to chocolates, to dinners out and weekends away – and they are more likely than women to buy elaborate gifts. With such huge revenue opportunities, ask yourself… how well did your brand perform and what can be done to improve performance for next year?

1.       Planning

People start searching for Valentine’s Day gifts around mid-January, with momentum picking up pace at the beginning of February. The biggest sales days are the 5th and 6th of February, with the week running up to the 14th February characterised by frenzied and frantic last-minute gift buying. This means brands have to get their thinking cap on and start planning well in advance. Think about what worked well the previous year and act on it. The earlier you start, the wider the audience you will reach.

February calendar with 14th highlighted with heart

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