In this tutorial Shaun Whynacht walks viewers through a repeatable workflow for turning an organic Facebook page post into a high‑performing ad that first gathers engagement and later drives conversions. He starts by selecting a recently published post (a 12‑week Social Primer series created with ManyChat) and creates a new Facebook Ads campaign using the Post Engagement objective. He explains his naming convention (L1, L2, etc.), sets a $50 lifetime budget for a 7‑day run, and carefully chooses the start and end dates. Targeting is built around small‑business owners in Canada, refined by age (40‑50), gender, interests (small business), and behaviors (small‑business‑owner), with an optional “expanded audience” toggle. Shaun then duplicates the ad set to run a split test in the United States, keeping all other parameters identical. The ad itself is an existing page post; he adds a “Learn More” CTA button linking back to the post (or a UTM‑tracked URL) and publishes the ad, noting the review process. Finally, he outlines the next phase: once the post has accumulated organic engagement, duplicate the ad into a Traffic or Conversion campaign so the social proof carries over, improving conversion performance. The video ends with a call for comments and suggestions for future videos.
Chapters
Hey, welcome to this video. I'm going to show you a strategy that I use and have had, you know, really good success with when it comes to taking an organic post that's on your page that you want to use for conversions later on and to generate more traffic. So here's a post that we just released today. We created this whole social media primer using ManyChat, which is a great system if you haven't checked it out yet. And we'll do a video about that on our channel soon, but what we developed was a 12-week Social Primer series where every week, you know, those who enroll completely free will get a message through Facebook Messenger with some tips on how to use their social media better for their business, okay? We're not here to sell that service to you in this video. I want to show you how I'm going to leverage this using Facebook ads. Now, you know that when you do posts, you have this little boost option down below. I don't really like to use that. I like to have a little more control, so what we're going to do here is we're going to go into our ads account with the business. Now, as you see, we're not running any current ads at the moment, but we're going to create one right now. So I'm going to go create and we get the Facebook ads objectives here. And what I'm wanting to do is I want to run an engagement ad. I don't want to do brand awareness or reach. I want to get engagement on that post. And those are the likes, the comments, the shares, all that kind of stuff. So that's what I want to get here. So I'm going to go down here and I'm going to start to put in the information. I'm going to make sure I choose post engagement, not likes, and not event responses. So let's go ahead and put in the names here. Now I use a little L1 because this is like level 1 of this whole sequence. And then as we move through, we use L2, L3, all that kind of stuff. So I'm going to call this here the Social Primer Engagement, and we are going to target small business owners. If I can type. And let's go with Canada. We'll just do Canada for this one. That's where we're located. And we're going to go and I like to use the same name as the campaign sometimes in here. So I'm going to put that in there. And we're going to click Continue. Now we go into the next stage of this and we go through it's not a special ads category. We're not doing anything with employment, housing, or all those kinds of type of fun things. And then we have the budget. Now, if this is something that I wanted to run a long time, like a campaign, I would put it in a daily budget. In this case, I only want to run it for 7 days to try to get that. So I'm going to go lifetime budget, and we're going to figure out how much we want to spend. So this is just a test, and I'm really kind of just doing this for the video. So let's say we want to spend, you know, $50 on this over that time period. Okay, so we're going to hit next. Now, when's the date? So we have June 9th, that's when I'm creating the ad, and it will automatically— and this is something where you can kind of fall victim to this, thinking you're only setting it up for a week. It'll always do it as a month in here, so it'll jump to the next month. This is June, it picked July here. So we want to go back and make sure that we go here, and I'm going to run it to the next Wednesday, which is the 16th, and I'll leave the same time, that's okay. So now we get into the targeting, and in this case, I'm going to change the targeting for my business, which primarily, you know, those who we work the best with in our business is between the ages of 30 and, you know, let's say, you know, 55. You know, that's primarily who we do, you know, the most business with. Canada, we'll pick that location. I could have put in the US as well in this, but what I would normally do is if I wanted to do this campaign and track it to see which one is converting better or has the most engagement, I would do another ad set for just US. Same targeting, just changing one variable to the US. So we're going to do Canada for this one. And now we're going to pick the custom audiences— not custom audiences, sorry. We're going to pick the detailed targeting. If I had an audience already created for this, I could choose it from there. So there's a lot in there if you look into the list. So small business, and we'll see what comes up here. So there's a lot that shows up under small business. Now, keeping in mind that you have interest, behavior, employer, school, like all the different types here. Now, interest, if we just hover over this, it says people who have expressed an interest or like pages related to small business. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to choose that one as well. And we're going to go to small business, and we can choose small business owners. Now, this is a behavior. This is people who have listed themselves as a small business owner. So those are my two demographics that I'm going to pick. Now you can go all out and have different ad sets for different categories of figuring that out, but I'm going to keep it as generic as possible as I want. So that is estimating right now an audience of about 3,100,000 people. Okay. Now it's going to try to show it to people who have engaged in ads before, not necessarily our ads, but any ads that are there. The larger the audience, the really, the more budget you need to get a true sense of that. So I'm going to tighten up the age category here to really get our true audience size. So let's see here. So we're down to 2 million. I want to get it around, you know, 1 million people. So let's go from 55. Let's go down to 50. Okay, so we're in— we're just under 2, 1.9. Let's go a little bit earlier here. Let's go 45. So we got a 10-year— okay, so 1.4. We got 35 to 45. Range in here. Um, that's pretty good. Um, if I'd say so. So we're gonna leave it. Actually, what I'm gonna do, I'm just thinking out loud here, because we are targeting people that need help with their social media, if you're 35, you're probably pretty okay with it. So let's shift this up a little bit more. Let's go to the 40 to the— let's go to 40 to 50. There we go, 1.2 million. We got ages 40 to 50 in that little sweet spot. Now, genders, I'm going to keep male and female. Perfect. Now, this little checkbox here that says, "Reach people beyond your detailed targeting selections when likely to improve the performance," I like turning that on in this specific case to do that. If I'm running a retargeting ad, I don't want to do that. Now, here's one thing I just noticed. When I turn that on, it goes to 5 million people. So if I turn it off, 1.2, 5 million. These are potential reach. I'm going to leave that on for now as well. We're going to leave automatic here because it is going to try to do it on Instagram, and we're looking for post engagement, and now we're going to go next. Now, this is where we start to build out the ad, knowing that the levels are campaign, ad set, and ad. We've done the campaign, we built the ad set, which was the targeting. Now we're going to move into building out the actual ad. The best part is with this, we're just going to choose an existing ad or existing post that's on our page. So the ad setup here says existing post. We're going to select the post, and here it is right there. We're going to choose that one, and we're going to click continue. It's just going to bring it in there. We don't have to change anything. We just leave it as is. Now we are going to add something to it. We can add a call to action button to this if we want. Okay, so knowing that I want to eventually turn this into an ad that is more of a conversion or even a traffic ad to get somebody to, to the page, I'm going to build it in here now because Later on, if I was to actually change the ad, I would lose all that social engagement. So we're going to go here, click add a button, and what I'm going to do is I need to get the link from that post. So we're going to come back over here and we're going to copy this one there. Copy. And we're going to paste it in there. Now, I haven't done this since the new update, so it might not let us do it, but we'll go click learn more, click update. Let's just see. Okay, perfect. So now because that's in there, It has the title and everything that's there. It would have the button for them, the link, which is awesome. If you want to do UTMs, you can to track that if you're coming to your website. We're going to ManyChat, so we're not catching those UTM codes coming through. And now we're going to click Publish, and we're going to see if we get any warnings. We'll just let Facebook do its thing here. And if you run ads before, you know, it's not instantly available right away. It goes into a review mode, and we're we wait for Facebook to review it. You will get an email notification that your ad is either accepted and running or rejected, and you know you can always come back and adjust it later on. So now, because we've gone in here and it says draft, but if we refresh up here, it should eventually change— oh, sorry, it's this one here, review. So the budget is set here on the campaign level, which means that if we duplicated the ad set down here, we would not double the budget. We are spending from the same budget. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go click edit, and I'm going to choose these three dots, and I'm going to go quick duplicate. It's just going to make a copy of this and the ad below it. So I'm going to go in here, I'm going to change this to United States, and the only change I'm making down here is I'm changing the location from Canada to United States. And we're going to click Publish again. And now we're really running a true split test to see which of those small business audiences in the two different countries are going to engage mostly with this content as well. So we may get different, you know, cross-sections and comments and all that kind of stuff. So that is set up. Actually, I'm going to hit Publish here. This is from a previous this ad that I was doing. So we will just wait and see, and this ad will be running. So that is how we go and set up that ad. Now, later on, what we would do, and we'll do this in another video, is once we've got those engagements, we'll actually set up a traffic ad or a conversion ad, and we'll set up the whole ad set for that, but we won't put any ads in it. We will come back to this ad or the one that we want to actually— it'd be over here, but the one that we want, and we would click duplicate and we would actually move it into another campaign. So that campaign would be listed here. We would select it. The ad set would be selected, and we would actually copy that ad into there and publish it as is. It will actually take all that social engagement over with the ad, and now when you're running it to that audience, It's like that ad has been around for a while already, even though you just started running that ad. So do that technique and you will see that your ads, when you're trying to get those conversions, will be juiced a bit better and better positioned for getting those conversions. So thank you very much for watching this video. Hopefully you learned something. If you have a question, put it in the comments below. I will answer your questions. If you'd like to see a video on something else, ask me in there as well, and I'd be happy to make that video for you.
