Andrea Vahl

May 22, 2013 by Andrea Vahl 5 Comments

How to Create a Facebook Ad Using the Power Editor

Have you been running Facebook Ads for your business? If you are regularly running ads, you may want to consider using the Facebook Power Editor to set up your ads.

I found the Facebook Power Editor a little confusing when I first got started and it still is a bit quirky (as all of Facebook goes) but there are a few good reasons to use Facebook Power Editor:

Better targeting of the location of your Ads. You can target your ad to run only in the News Feed, only on mobile devices, and other variations.
Capability to target your e-mail list. The Custom Audience feature allows you to upload your e-mail list to the Power Editor and then you can do all kinds of interesting things. You can target an ad to them specifically, you can analyze your e-mail list to find out more about their precise interests, or you can create a similar audience and use them as a “seed”.
You can use the Partner Categories to target people according to their buying habits. Partner Categories are relatively new feature of the Power Editor and you can use some of the “big data” out there to target very specific niches.

Now that you know WHY you should use the Power Editor, follow the steps below to get started with the Power Editor.

Install the Power Editor

Installing the Power Editor is fairly straight forward. The Power Editor is a Chrome plugin but it also works in Safari (and actually, I find it works better in Safari).

All you need to do is to go to your Facebook Ads area while you are logged in on a Chrome browser. To get to the Ads area, click the wheel in the upper right corner of Facebook and select Manage Ads. Now you see the Power Editor selection on the left sidebar of the page.

Once you do that, you see some directions on how to get started. Click the “here” link highlighted in step 2 of the process listed.

You will be prompted to download any ads you have previously run into Power Editor. The data on these ads will still be available in the regular Ads management area as well.

Creating an Ad in Power Editor

To create a new Ad in Power Editor, follow these steps:

Go to your Ads Dashboard area if you are not there already (click the wheel in the upper right corner, select Manage Ads)
Click on the Power Editor in the left sidebar. You now see your Power Editor dashboard.
If you want to create an ad that is within an existing campaign you have, click on the campaign name in the left sidebar.
If you want to create a new campaign, click the “Campaigns” button at the top of the page, and then click “Create Campaign” and fill in the details of your campaign name, budget, and length. Once you have filled out the campaign information, navigate back to the Ads area (click Ads at the top of the page)
Click the Create Ad button at the top of the page. Then you use the Ad area below to fill in the details about the Ad.
Fill out the information in each of the sections (Creative & Placements, Audience, and Pricing and Status). You should have no “Errors” listed and the status of the ad should be “Pending”. Your final step is to click “Upload” in the upper right corner of the screen. Your ad will not go into the approval process or start running until you upload it.

Once your ad is approved you will be able to see it in the Facebook Ads Manager area and access the stats there.

How about you? Have you been wondering how you can get started with the Power Editor? Or have you had success with the ads you have created through the Power Editor? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Filed Under: Facebook advertising

May 17, 2013 by Andrea Vahl 6 Comments

How to Change Your Facebook Page Name

Do you need to change your Facebook Page name? Have you been having trouble finding the how you go about changing your Facebook Page name or URL?

Well have no fear, I’ll show you how to exactly how to get this accomplished (even if it looks like you can’t get it done).

First there are two places that you can “name” your Page. One is the name that appears on your Timeline and that shows up next to every post in the News Feed.

Changing Your Page Name

You may have chosen a name without realizing how this was going to appear. If your Page is new or if you have less than 200 Likes, you can easily edit your Page name by accessing your Basic Information in your Page Dashboard.

Then you go to your Basic Info and you can easily Edit your name.

But if you are re-branding or you just want to tweak your Page name and you have more than 200 Likes you may have the opportunity to make a change 1 time. I say “may” because this option sometimes doesn’t appear even if you haven’t changed your Page name at some point in the past.

You may see a Request Change link next to your Name as shown here.

If you don’t see that Request Change link, you are going to have to go to Facebook Help. Facebook Help is sometimes very difficult to get any response from. It will be easier to get your name changed if you have a re-brand with a photo of your website or logo to show your rebranding information.

I recommend submitting your request in two places. The first one is the Help form for Pages here: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/164405897002583

I find having a screenshot helps to show your new branding so that Facebook can see that you have made a change.

The second place I recommend submitting a request is to Facebook Ads Help. Hopefully you are using Facebook Ads from time to time to build your Page and you probably don’t want to advertise your Page if the branding isn’t congruent with your website.

The Ads area seems to be a little more responsive to changes when you tell them that you can’t spend any more money with them until your Facebook Page name is changed (only do this if you are planning on running an ad campaign). Submit your request here: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact?id=615344471812117

We did this when we changed our Page www.facebook.com/TheBestKeynoteSpeakers and it took about a week to get it done. But you may need to submit your request a couple of times if you don’t hear back after a week or so. Hope those suggestions help! (Please note, I cannot help with Page Name Changes – you must go through Facebook to get your Page name changed)

Changing Your Page URL or Website Address

The other thing you can change (but it sometimes is challenging) is your Facebook Page URL. Your URL is the easy and short web address (like www.facebook.com/GrandmaMaryShow).

If you haven’t set your Username yet, go do that right now – it makes it much easier to tell people about your Page. But BE CAREFUL – this is more difficult to get changed. Once you set it, the URL is taken and can’t be “released” even if you delete the Page.

It can’t have any spaces between the letter and I don’t recommend putting things like periods or underscores between the words. Then when you set it, capitalize the first letter of each word. Even if someone types in the URL without the capital letters it will still go to the right place.

If you have already set your URL and need to rebrand, you can sometimes request a one-time change as shown before.

If you don’t have this capability, you will have to go through the same process as outline above with Facebook Help. I think the URL is as big a deal as making sure your you branding is consistent in your Facebook Page name. But if your name has changed drastically, then you should get that corrected.

Have you had to change your Page name in the past? How has it gone for you? Let me know in the comments (remember I can’t help with actual Facebook Changes, you will need to go to Facebook directly for that.

Filed Under: facebook

May 15, 2013 by Andrea Vahl 13 Comments

8 Tips for Using Facebook Scheduled Posts

Are you crunched for time?

Could you use a little Facebook automation in your life? Well, help is here.

Facebook allows you to schedule your page posts.

Many people cheered this feature because Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm and other quirks make using third-party tools like HootSuite or SocialOomph for scheduling your posts less desirable than posting manually.

Let’s dig a little deeper and find out some of the nuances of using Facebook scheduled posts.

First, we will give you the steps to schedule your posts and edit them.

#1: How to Schedule Your Posts

Scheduling is easy—just follow these steps:

Write your post as you normally would. You can attach photos, add links, add YouTube videos, add tags to other pages and events or just include regular text.

In the lower-left corner of your post, click on the clock symbol as shown in the screenshot above. You can now add the year, month, day and time you want the post to go out.

Notice that you can also backdate your posts to supplement your Timeline if you wish (more on that later).

You can schedule your post up to 6 months in the future (more months are shown, but if you select more than 6 months out, Facebook won’t accept it). You can schedule the minutes at 00-, 10-, 20-, 30-, 40- or 50-minute marks of the hour. So if you need a post to go out specifically at 2:15 pm, you cannot set it.

You can also add language and location targeting in your scheduled posts, just like you can in your regular posts. Just click on the Public icon and make the necessary adjustments.

Once you have everything set, just click the blue Schedule button. Voilà! Now just remember to circle back to your posts later after the scheduled time to watch for follow-up comments!

#2: How to Find and Edit Your Scheduled Posts

To see what you have scheduled and make any changes, just go to your activity log by accessing the admin panel at the top of your page (if you don’t see the admin panel, click the red admin panel button in the upper-right corner), then click Edit Page, and Activity Log. You then see all of your scheduled posts.

If you need to edit your scheduled post, the only thing you can change from here is the time, unfortunately. To edit the text, you must cancel the post and redo your scheduling. To cancel or change the time, mouse over the upper-right corner of the post in the activity log.

#3: You Can’t Schedule Everything

You can schedule links, photos, status updates and videos (although I found scheduling a video to be a bit buggy). You can also schedule a YouTube video link, which will attach as it normally does in your posts.

You can’t schedule some of the other types of posts as you can normally do from the publisher, such as photo albums, posting of events, questions, offers and milestones.

#4: You Can Backdate Your Posts

You can schedule things in the past. I’m not sure why you would want to use the backdating feature other than to fill out your Timeline a bit. But if you have a significant event that you want to post about in the past, I recommend a milestone post instead.

The interesting thing about backdating is that the post does go out into people’s news feed immediately and then is shown at the appropriate place on your Timeline.

#5: Scheduled Posts Won’t be Automatically Tweeted

If you have linked your Twitter account to your Facebook page by setting up www.Facebook.com/Twitter so that everything you post on Facebook gets tweeted (yes, we know that it’s not always a great idea but sometimes it isn’t terrible), be aware that your scheduled posts won’t go out to Twitter.

So if you rely on your Facebook page to supplement your tweets and you move to more scheduled posts, you will have to schedule your tweets with a different tool.

#6: Scheduling Posts Can Bring about More Engagement

What can you expect when you schedule posts? It depends on your baseline right now with your Facebook page—how often you are posting, how engaged your audience is, what you are posting and other factors.

One thing that scheduling can do for you is allow you to post more regularly and increase your posting without spending all day on your Facebook page.

Randi Thompson of How to Market Your Horse Business (and an active member of our Social Networking Clubs) tried an experiment where she upped the number of posts by using scheduled posts on two of her pages.

On her How to Market Your Horse Business page, she went from posting 3 times a day to posting every 3 hours and 5 times a day. Then she had another page, Horse and Rider Awareness, where she was not posting regularly at all. She tried scheduling 3 quality posts per day. Here are her results over a 5-day period.

Now of course this is not a comprehensive study. And this could be done without scheduling posts. But the point is that scheduled posts can make things easier for you so you can batch your work, know that things are being posted at the times you want and you can get on with other parts of your business. I encourage you to try some experiments with scheduled posts on your page and see how things work for you.

And again, make sure you circle back to these posts to follow up on comments!

#7: Scheduled Posts are not Identified or “Punished” in Facebook

When you post from a different scheduling tool such as HootSuite or BufferApp, people can see that you’re posting through a different tool. But Facebook’s scheduled posts are seamless.

Using a different tool to post to Facebook is not all bad. Sometimes it’s much better to save yourself a little time and get the post out with the tool you’re using rather than not post at all.

But Facebook has been known to show posts using third-party tools a little less in the news feed or collapse them. As of this writing, I believe third-party tools are faring well in Facebook. But we all know how Facebook changes.

#8: Scheduled Posts May be Coming to Personal Profiles

The option does appear to schedule a Facebook post on personal profiles, which may be a good thing for people who are using their personal profiles to talk about business. But as of this writing, I could not schedule anything into the future, only for today or in the past.

Not everyone will see big changes by scheduling posts. You still have to deliver engaging Facebook content. But what scheduled posts can do is free up some of your time by allowing you to batch your social media posts into blocks and give you more time to focus on your business.

What are your thoughts? Have you been using scheduled posts? What results have you seen? Tell us in the comments section below!

Note: This post originally appeared on Social Media Examiner and is reposted with permission.

Filed Under: facebook

May 13, 2013 by Andrea Vahl 2 Comments

Bite Off More Than You Can Chew…And Then Chew It

Today’s Pep Talk is inspired by a post I saw last week from The Bloggess called Rules for Life. I love the Bloggess – she has a little bit of a potty mouth so you’ve been warned.

I’ve always loved rule #12 and try to push myself as much as possible. But it doesn’t mean setting yourself up for failure, it means taking risks.

You know where you are playing safe and it’s time to bite off more than you think you can chew. It’s a little scary but you have to push past those scary boundaries that you are setting for yourself! Get out there and do it! I know you can.

Filed Under: Pep Talk

May 10, 2013 by Andrea Vahl 10 Comments

An Apology and a Request for Help

I need to apologize. I tell people to create a content calendar. I tell them to blog regularly. And while I’ve been posting at least one blog post per week, it’s been pretty erratic. Who knows when it will show up?

Well that is going to change. I am committing to my own content calendar starting today.

Take a look at my video to hear my apology and hear what I need from you. Grandma Mary keeps cutting in so be prepared.

Here is my Editorial Calendar on what I’m going to be posting each week:

Motivation Monday – a little pep talk from Grandma or some inspiration to get you started every week. Take a look at Grandma’s other Pep Talks to get the idea.
Technology Tuesday – an in-depth look at a social media tip or technique to help your business.
Fun Friday – either an interview, a quick social media tip, or something else that I might be featuring like a new product or event.

But I need your help. I want to hear about the topics you most need help with in the comments below. I want to make sure I’m covering what you need. It can be as specific or as broad as you want.

I have a ton of ideas on what I’m going to be covering but I want to make sure that what I blog about is beneficial to you! Let me know in the comments below! And don’t worry – Grandma won’t be singing any more karaoke.

Filed Under: Video

April 22, 2013 by Andrea Vahl 2 Comments

How to Analyze Your Email Newsletter List With the Facebook Power Editor

Do you want to gain quick insight into your email list?

Do your subscribers use Facebook?

If so, you can gain powerful insights and target Facebook Ads to your subscription base.

You do this using the Facebook Power Editor and Custom Audiences.

In the marketing strategy outlined below, you’ll learn more about the customers on your email list and you’ll be able to better tailor your Facebook marketing to your customers.

How It Works

If you’re an experienced Facebook Ads user, this is a great way to take your Facebook advertising to the next level. (Think Facebook Ninja trick)

If you’re just getting started with Facebook advertising or if your email list is fewer than 500 people, you may want to focus first on some of the other Facebook advertising strategies.

Facebook introduced the Custom Audiences feature to use email addresses or phone numbers to match the target audience, instead of the traditional Facebook ad targeting features such as demographics and interests.

After using this email address or phone number filter, you can also use the other targeting options to niche your campaign down to a special segment of your email subscriber list—such as your customers in Tennessee or your email subscribers between the ages of 35 and 45.

Reach specific members of one newsletter list.

You can have as many custom audiences as you like, so you can upload multiple lists of emails and phone numbers if you have your email list segmented.

One thing to point out with this strategy is that you’ll be using the emails that people used to sign up for your email newsletter—which may or may not be the same email address that people use to sign into Facebook. Or the people on your newsletter list may not even be on Facebook at all (incredible, I know). So you will not get a perfect match of data.

And just in case you’re worried about the privacy of Facebook’s Power Editor, they do not store these email addresses. In fact, they are uploaded as a hashed file (a file converted to numerical strings) just to compare to the emails of Facebook users.

Now, if you’re ready to dive into the Facebook Power Editor to use this powerful technique, just follow these 5 easy steps.

#1: Install the Facebook Power Editor

The Power Editor is a tool you can use to upload a large number of ads in bulk to your Facebook ad campaigns. If you are doing a large amount of split testing, this can be very helpful. Some people write hundreds of ads to test within a few campaigns to find out which one performs best.

If you haven’t installed the Facebook Power Editor, you’ll need to do that first. The Facebook Power Editor is a Google Chrome plugin, so you can only access the Power Editor when you’re browsing with Google Chrome.

If you haven’t downloaded Google Chrome yet, you can install it here. While using Google Chrome, follow these steps:

Log into your Facebook personal profile.
Click the wheel icon in the upper-right corner and select Manage Ads. You will see all of your Facebook ad campaigns.
Click Power Editor on the left sidebar.
If you haven’t installed the Power Editor before, you will see some information about the Power Editor and how you can install it.
Click the “here” link highlighted in Step 2 since you are already using Google Chrome.
Click the Add button to add the Power Editor shown in the popup box.
After installing it, you can now click the Power Editor button to open the Power Editor.
Download your ad campaigns into the Power Editor by clicking the Download button. You don’t have to do this, but it helps if you are going to use the Power Editor to create new campaigns in the future and you want to reference previous campaigns.

Download your ad campaigns into the Power Editor.

Now you have the Power Editor enabled and active.

#2: Download the Emails of Your Newsletter Subscribers

Next, you need to download the emails of your newsletter subscribers into a single column Excel spreadsheet or .CSV file. If you are using AWeber, Constant Contact,MailChimp or some other email program, you can do this very easily. You may need to strip out any additional data from the file.

Delete any extra data from your .CSV file before uploading it to the Power Editor.

Remember, you can create as many custom audiences as you want, so if you do have your email list segmented, you should maintain those segments. Hopefully you have a list of your actual customers segmented out from your general newsletter list, so you can upload that file separately.

#3: Create Your Custom Audiences

Go back into the Facebook Power Editor and upload your .CSV file. To get to the Custom Audience upload area, click on the Audiences label in the upper row, then select Custom Audience from the Create Audience drop-down menu as shown.

Add your custom audience.

You will see a popup box that prompts you to abide by the Terms and Conditions outlined. The terms require that you are using your own email subscriber list (or that you have all rights and permissions to use the data from the subscribers) and that the list consists only of people who have opted into your email list (and have not since opted out). Select the Agree button and another popup box will ask you to select your file to create your audience.

Select the file you created in Step 2 with your newsletter subscribers. In the Audience Name field, select a meaningful name so that you know which subscribers are matched to this list.

Add your file and your audience name.

You have now uploaded the file. It may take up to an hour for Facebook to process the file.

#4: Analyze Your Custom Audiences and Create Facebook Ads

Once you get your first custom audience uploaded, you will see the number of people who matched an email address on Facebook in your Power Editor.

See your custom audience list in the Power Editor.

You can create ads directly in the Power Editor, but I’ve found the interface difficult to work with and it can be glitchy. It takes some adjustments if you are used to reading your ads in the Facebook Ads interface. You can read more about it in Facebook’s guide here.

But a great benefit of uploading your email list as a custom audience is that you can now also access your custom audience in the Facebook Advertising interface. This is a great way to advertise to this list directly or to do a little analysis on this list.

To return to the Facebook Advertising interface, go to your Facebook profile, select the wheel in the upper-right corner and select Create an Ad. Now select your Page or any website you may want to advertise (it really doesn’t matter too much to see some of the analysis).

Then when you get to the “Choose Your Audience” section, you will see a new check box under the Broad Categories where you can select your custom audience. Select that check box and then you can do some analysis on your email list demographics.

#5: Gain Insight About Your List

Even if you don’t use this data for Facebook Ads, you can use it to gain insights about your list. If your list isn’t very large, targeting an ad to 200 people may not be an effective use of your Facebook marketing budget—but it isn’t too expensive to try it and see what results you get!

What you can do is find out more about their interests and demographics listed on Facebook by playing around with the Facebook Ad settings. For example, if you look at this particular list of emails I uploaded, you can find out a few things about them.

Select the list to analyze through the Facebook Ads interface.

Notice that the default location setting for me is United States, so I see that the number of people this potential ad would be targeting is 560.

The entire Custom Audience loaded in the Power Editor was 714 Facebook users (refer to the previous figure), so I immediately know that 154 people on this list live outside the U.S. I can also start adding other filters to the ad targeting and find out that 340 people on this list are women who live in the U.S.

You may start trying different precise interests to find out what keywords resonate with your current audience and use those keywords in future ad campaigns.

You can also create an ad specifically targeting a segment of your list of email subscribers and use appropriate copy in the ad to appeal to them.

One other thing you can do is find out how many of your current email subscribers are not fans of yours on Facebook and perhaps target an ad directly to them. Pretty powerful!

So now you’re able to find out more about your current email subscribers and reach them specifically on Facebook with a few easy steps.

Even if your email list is not large, it is beneficial to know more about your subscribers and this technique gives you another way to reach them on Facebook.

How about you? Have you experimented with the Facebook Power Editor? What results have you seen? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.