How to create a Facebook sponsored story or Facebook sponsored post
Ryan Dohrn walks through creating Facebook sponsored posts using Power Editor. Set your budget, target by location and interests, upload an image and copy, then track performance via Excel. He uses a $500 example with an estimated 57,937 impressions.
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Hi everybody, Ryan Dohrn here from Brain Swell Media, and thanks so much for stopping by and checking out this video. Today we're gonna be talking about how to create sponsored stories, or if you will, sponsored posts within the Facebook environment. And specifically, we're using a really cool tool from Facebook called Power Editor. Now, in the onset, let me express 2 very important things to you. One, it's very important that you read Facebook's terms of service before you engage in any type of activities on Facebook where you're involving advertising or reselling of their services. So make sure you really check that out. Secondly, I'm not a lawyer, so please don't think the advice I'm giving today should be misconstrued as legal advice, okay? Make sure that you check that out on your own. Alright, now for all of my magazine and publishing customers out there, here's what we're doing. We're in Chrome, and what we're doing is we're going to facebook.com And then we're gonna do /powereditor, okay? Power Editor up here in the URL box, okay? Power Editor. Alright, now we're also gonna do a video also for you. Whoops, spelled it wrong. There we go, Ryan. What we're gonna do also do is we're gonna do a video for you just using the regular standard Ads interface. I love the Power Editor, and right now as the time of recording this video, it only works in Chrome. Alright, now first thing up here in the top left, you need to make sure that your account is highlighted. That means the account that you've set up here through the billing options, okay, the account that you've set up. And this is my account that has my credit card attached to it. Okay, now first thing we're gonna do here on the left, campaign dashboard. First thing that we're going to do is we're actually going to create a campaign. Alright, so let's go to campaigns, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a new campaign. So in this case I'm gonna create a campaign here. I'm gonna call this campaign Magazine Test 3. Okay, just doing some testing here. Now I don't like auction campaigns. That's my personal preference. I would much prefer a fixed price campaign. Now why do I prefer that? Because typically if my advertisers want to be involved in my Facebook feed, of course we're paying Facebook for that. Okay, I want to be able to calculate the number of impressions for them. Alright, the start date is gonna be 11/26. In this case, the end date's gonna be 12/2. Let's just say that the budget we're gonna spend on this is $500. Obviously you're going to charge your customers whatever for the service that you're providing to them. Now from this list over here on the right side, rate, we're gonna choose United States. This is a step everybody misses, so make sure you don't miss that step. Now you'll notice if I'm spending $500 with Facebook What I'm gonna get for that is 57,937 impressions. Okay, and so that's how we can, we can really price this out in regards— you might mark that up, you might make it a cost break-even analysis. That's completely up to you. Now under status, I'm gonna choose paused. Remember, you have to create a campaign first. Now people always ask me, hey Ryan, how do I charge my advertisers for this? Remember, you've taken time to build a nice Facebook audience. So you want to make sure you charge accordingly. Again, double-check Facebook's terms of service. I see magazines doing this all over the country, so I'm sure that if they were doing it, you're gonna be fine. But it's up to you, make sure you check that out. Okay, all right, next we need to create our sponsored story or our ad. Okay, so we're gonna click here, we're gonna click Create Ad. Now in this case The advertiser's name is just gonna be, for me, Ryan's Flower Shop. Okay, put that there. Now what I wanna do is I wanna generate clicks to the website. Now there's all kinds of options, but for right now I'm generating clicks to Ryan's Flower Shop. Now you'll notice as we're doing things over here on the right, they're gonna be appearing over here on the left. Next, which Facebook account do I want it to go from? Now this is gonna be coming from my Brain Swell Media account. I could choose 360 Ad Sales if I wanted to. If you're a magazine, obviously you're gonna choose which magazine. Now here's the point of confusion. You're gonna create a new, okay, a new unpublished post. So we'll do that right here. And then what you're gonna do on that is you're going to very specifically— sorry about that, my Mac trying to help me— create a new unpublished post. In the URL box, that's where you're going to type in the URL of where you want the user to go. Here's the post text. So let's put in here, download, just as an example, download great flower ideas from Ryan. Alright, then you've got a link headline. The link headline is the bold text that appears as a part of the link portion of the story. So we might do free downloads all day long. Alright. As an example. Okay, obviously you wanna make sure that you spell things correctly. Then you have a link caption, caption that will appear directly beneath your link to describe the destination URL. Okay, so you type that there. In the description box, the description of the link, use the space to outline why someone should view this link or what they should expect when they click the link. And then here of course is where you would choose your image, so you can select your image from your computer. Upload it there. Okay, now you can also choose languages and you can target locations here as well. You click Create Post. You can use Photo here to edit photos, videos, and all kinds of other advanced options. Okay, so then here's my post. You'll notice that it's coming from 360 Ad Sales. Now what you might consider doing within this is you might actually want it right here to say Sponsored. Okay, you could do that right here as well. But one of the nice pieces of this, you'll notice, you know, very specifically, is that it really looks like it's coming from you, but it's actually going to be appearing within their feed as you target it. So here is the audience targeting portion of our tutorial. So now what you can do within the audience targeting is choose— do you want to choose city and states as an example, ages, genders, interests. Now here's the reason we want people to go through us as magazine or publishing customers, because what you can do through this post is you can actually target people from your magazine. So as an example, if your magazine, for example, was the Northwest Horse Source, you can target users who are connected to the Northwest Horse Source. You can target users who are not already connected to the Northwest Horse Source, or maybe I wanted to do Brain Swell Media, my Facebook page, I could do that. Friends of connections as well. And so all of these different variables allow you to be able to really target this sponsored post that's coming from you over to a specific audience. Okay, then over here under optimization and pricing, right now the status is pending. Okay, the campaign status is pending, so we're not going to see it there. If you would like to take it and unpin it, make it available, then you can do some more adjustments here. But overall, that's the way that you would create using the Power Editor. And I love the Power Editor because look here, guys, you're able to download this information into an Excel file. You're able to upload or do a bulk import from an Excel or a CSV file. You're able to do some really awesome reporting here within the Power Editing tool. So again, it's really important that you get together and you figure out how you're gonna price this, how you're gonna launch it, what are you gonna do with it. And again, it's really important, make sure that you're intimately aware of Facebook's terms of service. The reason I say that is because I don't want any of you to have your Facebook page shut down because of the advice that you're seeing here. So again, if you decide to do this, it's all on you, okay? So make sure that, that you're clear on what Facebook allows. I see this being done by magazines and publishing companies large and small all across the United States and Canada. But please don't take that for granted. I'm Ryan Dohrn from Brain Swell Media and 360 Ad Sales. If you need some help, reach out to me. My first 30 minutes with you is always absolutely free of charge, and you can reach me online very easy, ryan@360adsales.com. And the website is 360adsales.com or Brain Swell Media. Hope to see you on the road at one of my upcoming events. Thanks so much for checking this video out. And best of luck in your quest to use Facebook as a part of your overall publishing revenue strategy.
