Engagement within social media advertising has gotten a lot of bad press over the years, particularly when it comes to Likes.
However, not all engagements are created equally and we’ll explore below the pros and cons of running Engagement ads and what they can do for your relationship with your target audiences.
Facebook Engagement ads – why you should be using them
Facebook Engagement ads are designed to drive engagement in ads that are typically close to the top of funnel. These are defined and measured as Likes, Comments, Shares, Event Responses and Page Likes.
As with all Facebook ads, the objective you choose will optimise the ads you’re running to whatever you’ve chosen. So in this case, if you’re choosing “Engagement”, you’re going to get engagement.
And you’ll get this at quite high volumes as well. In some of our recent engagement ads, we’ve been seeing Cost per Engagement figures of below £0.05 per engagement.
So a fairly meagre budget of say £100 at £0.05 per engagement will deliver you over 2,000 engagements. When the majority of these are Likes (which are still currently visible to other users) this can do things:
- demonstrate to other members of your target audience that this is a post worth engaging with
- shows you up to 2,000 people who have engaged with your content
The latter element provides you with an opportunity to grow your following – particularly on Instagram – using an approach we like to call “honeypotting”.
What is Honeypotting? A great way to grow your Instagram following.
Honeypotting is a way of attracting people to your brand by getting them to engage with your content.
By engaging with your ad, you are unearthing those within your target audience that are more engaged than those that don’t. From this position, you can take a number of options, the most compelling of which is to start engaging with these people yourself.
Whether you follow them or simply like their content, Honeypotting is a great way of finding people who are warm to your brand or content, beginning the start of their journey from cold prospect to warm lead or new follower. And ideally, a customer.
Using Honeypotting as a technique allows you to grow your Instagram following at relative scale, as small amounts of time and money can create thousands of people to engage with, without too much time, effort or budget.
Engagement ads provide great ad units to maximise success
Engagement ads give you 3 options for the type of engagements that you can drive towards:
- Page Likes
- Post Engagements
- Event Responses.
Each of these are designed to drive maximum amounts of each metric – so lots of likes for both your page and content, as well as attendees to your events. ⠀
Both Page Likes and Event Response ads provide a bespoke ad unit that is specifically made to make performing the desired action as easy as possible. This can really help drive up volumes of engagement.
However, there are some limitations to using these ad formats.
Facebook Engagement ads – why you shouldn’t be using them
While there are some benefits to the ad units that can be used, Post Engagement ads can be really limit your creativity. For this format, you can only use either an Image, Collection or Video ad.
That means no Carousels. This can be a real drawback when you’re trying to showcase your product range and are trying to get people to engage and respond to the ads and products you’re showing. ⠀
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There are also question marks around the depth of the engagements you’re able to generate – particularly on Instagram. We’ve run lots of campaigns recently where ads that are designed to take people away from Instagram as quickly as possible – namely Traffic ads – have produced far higher volumes of comments and shares than Engagement ads. So something to bear in mind. ⠀
Spending large volumes of money on generating Facebook Page Likes is no longer a viable strategy. Whereas on Instagram, organic reach can still allow brands and advertisers to communicate with the followings they’ve amassed, the same can’t be said for Facebook.
Your advertising efforts and money are far better suited to going more direct to your target audience(s), rather than spending money trying to attract them to your page, only to be disappointed when you can’t reach them through organic means.
Social Acumen opinion on Facebook Engagement ads
Engagement ads can be a highly effective way of attracting new and cold audiences to your brand at scale. Through Honeypotting techniques, you can start relationships with thousands of your target customers in a very time and cost efficient manner, helping you to grow your social media following and prospecting funnels.
There are drawbacks to some of the ad units and the creative you can run. And running ads for Page Likes on Facebook is by all accounts a waste of money.
So use these to start building out your funnels and Instagram followers and see how many of these little hearts you can turn into real customer prospects.
Related links and Case Studies
If you’re keen to explore how we helped Visit Britan to analyse the engagement they were getting from their global Influencer programme then have a look at our Visit Britain Case Study.
