How To Keep Social Proof on Facebook Ads

Facebook Advertising is currently one of the most effective tools to generate leads and sales, create loyal customers, and grow your business. With this comes increased competition and cost, making it vital to launch effective Facebook ad campaigns to stand out amongst the sea of advertisers.

A great way of increasing the effectiveness of your Facebook ads is leveraging the power of social proof. The product evaluation process and purchasing decision of a consumer is largely influenced by the behaviors and opinions of other consumers. User engagement in the form of likes, comments, and shares on your Facebook ads is indicative of a positive response to your content.

As such, social proof on your ads is a major asset to your business, and if you apply it properly, this display of feedback can help you get better results from your Facebook Ad campaigns. Below is a guide on how to keep your build-up social proof on well-performing ads when duplicating it for different audiences.

Why Social Proof is Important for Facebook Ads

Last year, Facebook reshaped the way it measured the performance of your ads. The social media giant replaced its previous single relevance score with three new ranking metrics. One of these metrics is the Engagement Rate Ranking.

Engage Rate Ranking is based on the expected engagement of your Facebook ad compared to other ads battling for the same audience. Facebook uses likes, comments, and shares as one of the scoring factors. High positive engagement demonstrates to your target audience that other people like the ad and the offerings being advertised.

Facebook uses this ranking, alongside other relevance rankings, to ascertain that an ad is great for the users. As a result, your ad is more likely to be delivered to your target audience and at a cheaper cost. This clearly shows that building and keeping social proof is necessary for a successful Facebook Ad campaign.

It can be difficult to keep up with and adapt accordingly to some of these changes and policies from Facebook and other advertising platforms. This is why it is a great idea to enlist the services of paid advertising experts to manage your PPC accounts.

Keeping Social Proof across Your Facebook Ads

In the Facebook Ads Manager, when you create a new ad, the platform generates a new page post. Facebook assigns a unique reference number to each of these new posts. The reference number is referred to as the post ID.

If you decide to duplicate one of your high performing ads, an entirely new post will be created with a new post ID. Regardless of the fact that it is a duplicate ad, the engagement you got from the previous ad will be attached to the post ID of that original ad. This means that all the likes, comments, shares, and reactions (social proof) from the original ad will not be transferred to the new one.

The good news is there is a rather simple way of keeping all your built-up social proof when duplicating your Facebook ads for different audiences. The trick is to link your new ad to the original one, and we are going to show you systematically how to do this. This method is based on social stacking on Facebook.

The standard Facebook ad campaign structure comprises of ad sets. You will have numerous ad sets targeting various audiences with different ads. You can be able to stack up the engagement or keep social proof to a single ad.

Instead of having many ad sets pointing to many copies of the same ad, you simply point all your ad sets to one winning ad. It is worth noting that this method is applicable only to the newsfeed placement.

Step 1

The first step is fetching the post ID of your well-performing Facebook ad that you seek to duplicate. Once you are inside the Ads Manager, navigate to this ad and open it to edit.

At the top right corner of the Ad Preview section, you will find the outgoing link icon (arrow within a box). Click on this icon and then select the ‘Facebook Post with Comments' tab. Open your Facebook ad with all the likes, comments, and shares to fetch its post ID.

Step 2

Clicking on the ad link will open it in a new tab. Next, check the page URL. The post ID is the number that appears after the "/posts/" string in the URL at the end. Copy this group of numbers and save them as you will use them in the following steps.

Step 3

After you copy this post ID from your winning Facebook ad, the next step is creating a new ad as you would normally. Go back to Ads Manager and navigate to the ad set you want to create your new ad in.

At the Ad Set level, choose a new audience as you do when you are developing a Facebook ad campaign. Next, click the ‘Create' (green) button to make the new ad. You will see a ‘Use Existing Post' tab on the create ad screen. Click on this tab.

Step 4

You will see several quick ways of selecting page posts. Do NOT select these items. Input the post ID you had copied on the field provided instead and then click the Submit button.

If you followed the above steps correctly, you should see your original winning Facebook Ad carried over with the likes, comments, and shares. You can now be able to test this ad with various audiences, locations, and placements.

Overall, keeping social proof can be vital when you are scaling your Facebook ads and seek to test a single ad across different ad sets and audiences. You eliminate the need to create a unique ad for every ad set and acquire new social proof.

If you want to improve your Facebook ad campaigns, you have to ensure that you retain your existing engagement. This tweak may seem minor but will provide you with the social proof necessary for impressive ROIs.

As you must have realized by now, Facebook advertising as part of paid traffic management can be tricky in a world of tight competition and increasingly savvy marketers. With a wide range of aspects like geo-targeting, ad scheduling, remarketing campaigns, lead generation, conversion, and ROI optimization, the need arises for the expert services of a dedicated, knowledgeable, and experienced PPC management agency.