Three ways to tame the Facebook content monster

Quick history lesson: Facebook actually didn’t even allow paid advertising in news feeds until 2012. That means we’ve only had four short years to understand and optimize our ads on the platform! Considering the long, storied histories of other advertising mediums like television, radio, and print, Facebook is a very young – but incredibly powerful – player when it comes to advertising for companies.

Much of Facebook’s advertising power comes from its unrivaled access to information about its users. With billions of users and billions of dollars spent on ads every year, it’s astounding to think of the rich data that Facebook has about its users.

With its unparalleled user intelligence, Facebook is one of the most attractive and effective advertising platforms.

However for most advertisers, it isn’t exactly the easiest platform to master. Many end up feeling overwhelmed and defeated as they struggle to deal with three common challenges.

Keeping up with constant changes

One of the most common things marketers complain about when it comes to advertising on Facebook is that it’s a constantly moving target. Facebook’s frequent algorithm changes have been frustrating for marketers who feel that just as they finish developing a strategy, things change all over again.

Make it a habit to stay updated on Facebook’s changes. Having information as quickly as possible will allow you to adapt and tweak your strategy.

There are tons of online resources that you can go to for the latest news, trends and best practices in social media and Facebook marketing. Facebook also offers lots of content for marketers to stay updated on its developments.

Follow these sources and influencers on social media or subscribe to their newsletters. Set aside some time daily to get through your feeds. It also helps to set up a process that allows your workmates to share useful articles and resources they come across, so the onus isn’t on just one person to keep updated.

For a start, you can check out the following:

Facebook For Business

Facebook Newsroom

Social Media Examiner

Jon Loomer

Andrea Vahl

Satiating the content beast

Another common challenge for marketers is the lack of resources to produce sufficient content in a sustainable and economically feasible way. This is especially so for keeping ad campaigns optimized.

Ad fatigue is one of the main reasons behind poor performance and most advertisers find it a challenge to produce enough creatives to feed the ravenous beast that is Facebook.

Marketing dollars end up being wasted on ads that have lost their ability to generate optimal CTRs. In a fast-paced online medium like Facebook, both attention and creative lifespans are extremely short. The average human attention span is now only 8 seconds while creatives need to be refreshed every 3-5 days before ad fatigue starts setting in.

If you’re unable to significantly expand your creative team (and most of us aren’t!), consider scaling up your creative output by outsourcing or engaging the services of third party platforms that support large sustainable creative output volumes.

Making sense (and use) of data

Facebook’s strength is truly in the data that it owns. Part of what data can do for advertising is assess its effectiveness on a very granular level – but to date, many marketers have struggled to find a simple and less time consuming way to effectively harness the power of data.

While it isn’t difficult to access an insanely copious amount of data, it is often a challenge to make sense of and derive actionable insights from it.

Technologies like AI or machine learning have enabled the possibility of effectively creating, testing and placing creatives in a most cost-effective way. We even have the ability to predictively analyze ads and make informed decisions on which versions to deploy based on the likelihood of their performance.

Automation features now allow us to sit back and relax while little AI elves work round the clock to ensure creatives are automatically selected, swapped and renewed as campaign performance is optimized. Such is the power of data driven creatives.

As difficult as it may seem, taming the Facebook monster is entirely possible. With the right strategies and tools, you might actually have some fun along the way.

Winner of Facebook’s Innovator of the Year, ReFUEL4 is the world’s leading datadriven creative platform, delivering assets from 10,000 global creators backed by predictive AI technology. Learn more here.