There are many reasons you might want to merge Facebook business pages. Maybe you have an old or duplicate page that is no longer active. Or you may be managing multiple pages but decide it’s a duplication of efforts, so you want to consolidate under one.

The good news is that if you are the admin of both Facebook pages, you may be able to merge them. That said, there are several reasons that you may not be able to merge these pages — some that you can correct and some that you can’t.

If you’re running into issues with merging Facebook pages, it’s probably for one of these reasons…

1. Different Names

You can’t merge pages that have different names and represent different things. You can’t merge a page for a pizza shop with a page for a plumber, for example — even if you own both.

It’s possible that you have two pages that represent the same thing, though, but the page names are slightly different. If necessary, you can request a name change to correct this.

2. Different Addresses

If the two pages you want to merge have physical locations, you can’t merge the pages if they have different addresses.

Of course, this should be an easy fix. Simply update one of the pages so that they match.

3. Different Business Managers

You can’t merge pages if they are under different Business Manager accounts. Just make sure to move both pages to the same Business Manager account.

This is done under “Accounts” within your Business Settings.

4. Primary Page Conflict

You can’t merge Facebook pages if the page you want to merge from is the primary page of a Business Manager account.

In this case, just change the primary page for that Business Manager account. You do this within the “Business Info” area of your Business Settings.

At the top, it should display your primary Facebook page. Click “Edit” to change it.

5. Classic and New Pages

You can’t merge pages if one page is a Classic Page and one uses the New Pages Experience.

You can technically switch one of the pages back to Classic in order to merge. Just know that this is messy since the page you switch back to classic will lose access to certain things.

6. Verified Into Non-Verified

You can’t merge a verified page into a page that isn’t verified (and why would you do this anyway?). If there is actually a good business reason for doing this, get the unverified page verified first.

7. Global Pages

You can’t merge pages if both pages are global pages. Global pages allow you to share local versions of content with a single universal brand name and vanity URL for each page.

There aren’t many reasons you’d want to merge global pages. But if you have two global pages, you likely have an account rep who can help you with this.

Your Turn

Are you still having trouble merging pages? What issues are you seeing?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 7 Reasons You Can’t Merge Facebook Business Pages appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There is a need to sometimes limit the audience of people who see your Facebook posts (or page!). While it’s counter to the standard “more reach, please” attitude of most Facebook marketers, occasionally there are circumstances that require you to restrict your Facebook audience.

Let’s review three ways to apply audience restrictions on Facebook. We’ll look at an example of Page-Level Restrictions, Post-Level Restrictions, and a special case involving Lead Forms.

Restrict Your Facebook Audience at the Page-Level

To limit the visibility of your entire Facebook page to certain audience groups, you can adjust the page settings by following these steps:

First, access the admin panel for your Facebook page. If you use Business Manager, you may need to log in to your Business Manager account.

Click Settings on the top right of the panel:

Make sure you are on the General tab:

At the Page Level, you have two restriction options. You can limit the audience to specific countries as well as set minimum age restrictions.

For Country Restrictions, you can choose to either set specific countries where the page will be visible or choose regions where you want to hide the page:

For Age Restrictions, you can select a minimum age for users to see the page:

If there is not already a minimum age selected and you select one of the options to set a minimum age, you may see a warning message from Facebook. This warning reminds you that fans who have already liked your page from outside your minimum age will automatically unlike the page, so be careful with this. There is also a message indicating that age-restricted pages cannot be linked to groups:

As the warning message indicates, people outside the specified aged group will not be able to see your page. They’ll simply see a content unavailable notification, like this:

Restrict Your Facebook Audience at the Post-Level

You can limit the audience of specific posts on your page.

Similar to how we approached this with Page-Level targeting above, begin with the General tab of your page’s Settings section.

Beside the option “Audience Optimization for Posts”, click Edit. From here, select to enable the “Audience Optimization for Posts”, if the box is not already checked:

By updating this setting, you will now have an option to add audience restrictions when you create a post.

With this setting enabled, you have two options to add restrictions to a post.

To add restrictions to a post created directly on the page, select the targeting drop down:

*Facebook recently changed the way this looks, so it’s possible your targeting selector may appear different from this screenshot.

Select the option for Restricted Audience:

You can specify your audience restrictions here, and then save the changes:

You may have noticed that alongside the Restricted Audience option, there is an option for News Feed Targeting. If you’re interested in this functionality, check out this write-up from Jon on Facebook Audience Optimization.

To apply post-level audience restrictions for a post created via the Publishing Tools interface, click on the globe icon at the bottom of the post:

Select the option to Limit Audience By Demographics:

From here, you can specify the demographic parameters you’d like to use as limitations for your audience:

Location targeting at the Post-Level offers a few more options than location targeting at the Page-Level. In particular, at the Post-Level, you can target specific countries, states/regions, cities, or postal codes — even congressional districts. But at the Page-Level, you can only restrict the audience by country.

Lead Forms Audience Restrictions

Facebook Lead Forms have their own special options for audience restrictions. These are set during the form creation process. This feature is easy to miss, and you may even find that your Lead Forms already defaulted to a restricted audience in the past.

To set restrictions on Lead Forms, click on the Settings tab during the form creation process:

If you want to change the audience to Open, simply select that option.

As defined by Facebook (when you hover over the small ‘i’ beside the “Sharing” indicator):

By default, only people who are delivered your ad directly will be able to see and submit this form. Select “Open” to let people share this form with friends and allow submissions from people tagged in the comments.

Note that the restriction applies to the Lead Form itself, not to the associated post. This means users outside the specified audience could see the copy and creative of the post, but if they click to open the form, the Lead Form would not appear.

Generally speaking, I recommend changing Lead Forms to Open. Why? You may have users who want to share the form with their friends. If those friends are not in the audience you are using for the Lead Ad associated with the form, they will not be able to see the form even though they can view the post. This can be frustrating to your audience, and damage their perception of your brand or business.

That said, there may be certain scenarios where you only want people in the ad audience to be able to enter the form. Having this option available may be helpful to you.

The Restricted Facebook Audience Roll-Up

• You can restrict the audience on Facebook at the Page Level and at the Post Level.
• Page-Level restrictions apply to all posts that come from the page.
• Post-Level restrictions apply only to individual posts.
• Post-Level restrictions have some added location targeting functionality that Page-Level lack.
• Lead Ads/Lead Forms have their own restricted audience capabilities. They may have defaulted to restricted audiences without your realizing it!

Your Turn

Do you have a need for restricting your audience on Facebook?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Three Ways to Restrict Your Facebook Audience appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I’ve written previously on Reporting on Facebook Reach, particularly at the Page Level. Another opportunity is to dive more deeply into Reach reporting at the Post Level.

This can be useful in many cases and allows us to more fully understand Facebook Post Reach.

Why You Need to Report on Facebook Post Reach

There are a couple of times in particular when reporting on post reach is useful…

1) When you want to consider organic results in your reporting for paid posts.

• Particularly relevant when you have a paid post or campaign that performs extremely well among paid content, as it can often become heavily served by Facebook’s system organically as a result.
• Without including organic results, you might be missing out on a great deal of performance data and insight.

2) When you are trying to identify particularly high performing posts — potentially for promoting them later — and you’d like to use Reach data as an indicator of post performance.

Facebook Post Reach Defined

First, let’s clarify reporting of organic and paid reach metrics.

• If a user sees the post as a paid placement (i.e. it has the “Sponsored” label in News Feed, for example), that user is included in the Paid Reach count.
• If a user sees the post as an organic placement (i.e. it came directly from the page into the News Feed without a “Sponsored” label), that user is included in the Organic Reach count.
• Importantly, if a user sees placements as both of these types, they are counted in each individual metric, but they are only counted once when the cumulative numbers are totaled for overall Reach.

Here’s how Facebook explains it on one of their help pages:

If your post reaches someone through both paid and organic distribution, they’re counted toward each. Keep in mind that the sum of organic and paid reach won’t always equal post reach. For example, if one person sees your post through both organic and paid distribution, they’ll be counted as 1 in organic reach, 1 in paid reach, and 1 in post reach.

This will likely make more sense in a bit once we get through some specific examples.

Accessing the Data: Post-Level Reporting

First, Facebook does have a method for accessing high-level data on Posts. You can review this simply by clicking on the Insights tab from the top of your page. Facebook may require you to log into Business Manager first if you have your page managed there.

You can either scroll down on the Insights panel or click on Posts from the left side. If you click Posts, you’ll see a list of recent posts, with high-level info:

For further detail, back from the main Insights panel, you can click the “Export Data” to the right:

You can then select to export Post Level data from this screen, by clicking the Post data option. You can adjust the date range, as well as adjust the data you choose to export. Facebook offers several options here to change the layout of the data you export.

I normally like to download all of the data in bulk, instead of running into a situation where I wished I had captured something and have to re-export. If you want to make a change to your selection, you can do so from here. You can also save a favorite layout so that you don’t have to rebuild it in the future.

Post-Level Data vs. Ads Manager

One thing to note is that you will often find somewhat different results from this report, compared to what you would see when viewing similar data in Ads Manager. I’ve seen some indication that this could be due to different estimation models between the data sources, but it can also be impacted when you have additional placements for your ads (such as if you use a Facebook post as the ad material to publish on Instagram or in Instant Articles).

Post-Level data should only be showing you results from your post appearing on News Feed and on your Facebook Page (viewed when users visit your page directly).

Now that we have the data exported, we get to the fun part.

First, you should notice the various tabs across the bottom of your exported file. Though there are fewer options than at the Page Level, there is some potentially valuable data in these. We’ll get to some of this in a bit.

Comparing Paid, Organic, and Total Results for Facebook Post Reach

Going back to our earlier definition of Total Reach vs. Organic Reach or Paid Reach, you should see that if you attempt to add together your Organic and Paid Reach values for a specific row, the total is (almost) always more than the value indicates in Total Reach, at least in cases where you had any paid support for your post. It may look something like this:

*Facebook reports columns I, J, and K in the Post-Level export. In this example, I’ve included L as a calculation of adding J and K together. Column M is L minus I, which is explained more below.

We discussed earlier that the Total Reach metric will not double-count an individual that is reached by both Paid and Organic placements. When some users are reached by both Paid and Organic placements, our numbers can be thrown off. Calculating specific, post-level frequency can be a bit tough (some would say technically impossible).

However, we can evaluate how many people were reached by both Paid and Organic posts by using this data. Essentially, it should just be the difference between our manual calculation and the Total Post Reach number Facebook provided.

In our hypothetical example above, for the post on July 14th, we would do the following: Organic Reach PLUS Paid Reach = Manually Calculated Total Reach, or 2027 + 112,841 = 114,868. The difference between this number and the Facebook Reported Total Reach is our overlap, so 114,868 – 114,539 = 329 people who were reached by both organic and paid placements of the post in question.

Would you want to do this manual calculation breakout? I don’t see much of a reason, but you could use this method if needed.

Reporting Impressions is not as problematic, much like Page-Level reporting. Facebook separates Paid Impressions and Organic Impressions accordingly, and these require no de-duplication or manual re-calculation. You should see that simply adding these numbers together will equal the Total Impressions reported metric. This makes for easier reporting.

Breaking Out Facebook Post Reach Results: Fans vs. Non-Fans

Another under-utilized, interesting metric available from Post-Level data gives us the ability to understand what portion of reach was comprised of page fans vs. people who are not fans. Some might think of these as your “not-yet fans.”

If you navigate toward the right in the exported file from earlier, you’ll find a metric called “Lifetime Post Reach by People Who Like Your Page.” This simply means Lifetime Post Fan Reach.

If you subtract this value from the Total Reach, you have a measure of non-fan reach.

You can use this to estimate how much of your content is reaching fans vs non-fans, which could have interesting implications on ad targeting and investment. Normally, you will see that your paid posts reach a much higher percentage of non-fans vs. fans.

You should also find that organic-only posts reach many more fans than non-fans. However, there are exceptions — especially when a post is shared heavily.

Though this makes intuitive sense, some advertisers might be surprised by these findings.

Here’s a sample calculation to illustrate how you can do this:

*Facebook includes columns I and U in the Post-Level export. I’ve included V, W, and X as calculated fields.

Unpublished Posts: Organic Reporting Challenges

You’ve likely heard of “dark posts” or unpublished posts. These are basically just posts that never appear directly on the Facebook page used to publish ads (except for those appearing on the Info and Ads tab as part of Facebook’s transparency work).

The challenge with these posts is that they also do not appear in Post Level exports from your Facebook page. This means that we are unable to utilize the exported data to do the fun analyses of separating out paid vs. organic results, fans vs. non-fans, etc.

Sometimes, in the case of particularly strong posts that create a great deal of engagement, missing out on this organic reporting can be a big deal. You may have posts that deliver a much larger amount of organic results vs. paid, even in cases where the paid results are robust.

If it’s particularly important to ensure you capture organic data, there is a small, somewhat manual workaround to this.

First, we go to Ads Manager or Business Manager. Then we select the drop down from the top left, and select Page Posts, under the Create and Manage option.

Once selected, you can specify the page you’d like to review post data for.

Though it can take some patience to navigate, you can select to see all Ads Posts. You can then individually explore and review post results.

From the main screen of Page Posts, you’ll see metrics for topline Reach, Engagement, and “People Talking About This.”

If it’s a video post, you can select to open the post and then see an indication of results.

If you hover over the Reach bar on the bottom left, you’ll see a breakout of data for Organic vs. Paid performance.

Note: You can get to the same data from within Ads Manager if you select the Preview Arrow and then open the Post from the link…

When your post is NOT a video, unfortunately, there’s not a straightforward way to break out the organic results for unpublished posts (at least not yet that I’m aware of!). However, the Page Posts tool would at least show you the top-level reach results.

You could spot check this against your Ads Manager reach data. If the number shown on the Ads Post in the Page Posts tool is vastly larger than the reach number reflected in Ads Manager, then you know you might have a particularly strong organic performer on your hands. Congrats!

One bright spot: Page-Level reporting DOES include data on unpublished posts, though it is not broken out for each post. You can see a write-up on that topic here.

What Does All This Mean?

1. Total Post Reach is not simply the sum of Organic Reach and Paid Reach.
2. You can separate and analyze performance of posts for Fans vs. Non-fans, which may provide interesting insights.
3. Capturing Organic performance data on Unpublished Page Posts is possible in many cases, though this data can be limited.

Your Turn

Do you use Post-Level Reporting? Do you have any particular challenges with comparing performance data from Ads vs your Organic results?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Post Reach: Post-Level Reporting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Reach is one of the metrics you hear about a lot when it comes to Facebook reporting. When we report on Facebook Reach, there are two main classifications to remember – Facebook Page Reach and Facebook Post Reach.

Facebook Page Reach tends to be the least troublesome of the two, so let’s start here first.

Properly understanding reach tends to be a source of confusion for many marketers, particularly when it comes to reporting on Organic Facebook Reach. I often see it arise in conversations with other members of the Power Hitters Club who are working on performance reports.

Jon has written about this metric in the past, particularly after Facebook made changes to the way reach is defined.

A general disclaimer: For organic Facebook Page Reach, I do not recommend over-emphasizing this metric. It can be a vanity metric that is not connected to actual results.

However, you may have a reason for more holistic performance reporting, such as when you have a particularly high performing advertised post or campaign, and you wish to include organic results in broader performance analysis.

How to Get Facebook Page Reach Data

The simplest way to access page-level Facebook metrics is to click the Insights tab at the top of your page. Note: if your page is in Business Manager, you’ll need to log into Business Manager first to view this option.

After you click the Insights tab, you can click Reach on the far left. At the top right, you can adjust the date range. As you’ll no doubt notice, this is very high-level information. The options on the top right of the chart can split the data into Organic or Paid.

If you are a bit more daring with your data and want freedom to manipulate it more (don’t be afraid to jump in!), you can export Page Level insights info directly from the page.

You can export by clicking the Insights tab, then clicking “Export Data” from the top right.

You’ll see options to export Page Level data from this dashboard by clicking the Page data option. You can adjust the time range, and specify the data to be exported.

Facebook offers several options here to change the layout of the data you export. I normally like to download all the data in bulk, instead of running into a situation where I wished I had captured something and have to re-export.

If you want to make a change to your selection, you can do so from here. You can also save a favorite layout so that you don’t have to rebuild it in the future.

Once you have selected the data points you need, click Export, and it should generate a .xls file for downloading.

If you’ve left All Page Data in the export, the first thing you’ll notice is just how much information is captured. There are many tabs offering deeper, fragmented detail. For now, we’ll just focus on the Reach Metrics.

Getting Facebook Page Reach Information out of Page-Level Data

At the time of this writing, on the main tab, you should see the following columns related to Reach: Daily Total Reach, Weekly Total Reach, 28 Days Total Reach.

These are also broken out into Organic and Paid for each time range, as well as something Facebook refers to as “Viral Reach” – which essentially means that a Facebook user saw the post along with some form of social context. That is, they saw the post along with a message saying their friend has interacted with it.

A helpful tip in case you get confused: There is a definition under the header of every column of the export to tell you what it means.

Now comes the fun part!!! (Also where most people tend to make a few mistakes.)

The golden rule on this: you cannot add together lines to get a total number of reach. Said another way – you cannot simply add together reach numbers, line by line, for a total.

This is because each data row is a measure of unique people for that date, and you may have people reached on multiple days who could be counted twice if you simply sum the rows.

For example – let’s say you wanted to know the total number of people who were reached by your page from July 1 – July 5. It seems logical that you could simply add together the numbers from the rows associated with those days. However, Reach is a measure of Unique Users, which is a very important distinction. When you add these numbers together, they are not de-duplicated… so your sum would be incorrect.

We can illustrate this with a hypothetical example…

Let’s say we had the following results, for three different days in July:

• 100 People on July 1
• 200 People on July 2
• 100 People on July 3

If you simply added these together, you would assume you have reached a total of 400 FB users over these three days. However, you (almost) always will have some level of user overlap of reach from day to day. Therefore simply adding these numbers together will give you an inaccurate count.

It’s important to note that de-duplicating is primarily an issue with metrics associated with unique people (such as reach, Daily Page Engaged Users, or any “user” metrics). If you are reporting on a metric that is not unique per user – such as Impressions – you can add across rows without any of these issues associated with duplications in your data.

De-Duplicating Facebook Page Reach Results

While page-level reach reporting is somewhat limited based on how we can de-duplicate user-specific data, there are some ways that Facebook’s system does this for you automatically. An example is the inclusion of the Weekly and 28 Day numbers.

Based on the way these numbers are presented, they should be providing rolling counts of select metrics against the time frame indicated. What this means: for a Weekly Total Reach count, the number indicates the user reach Facebook estimates for your page on a weekly basis, for the dates associated with that specific row.

If you’re more on the nerdy side (or just curious!), you can do your own de-duplication exercise by adding the daily data for a 7-day period and comparing that with the Weekly data reported for the same date.

This will give you an idea of just how badly you can overestimate results if you were to simply add the raw numbers together. This also provides a better understanding of the number of people who heard from your page more than once in a specific period.

Here’s an example with some sample data from a page to illustrate. We’ll walk through the numbers to make sure this is clear.

*In this example, the Page-Level export includes columns H and J. I’ve added I and K as calculated columns.

If we use the weekly reported numbers from June 30th as our specific example, we would have simply added the rolling day count from the 7-days prior period had we been doing this manually. This would give us 4,274 total people reached (15 people on June 24th + 24 people on June 25th… etc). However, Facebook reports that the total Weekly Unique Reach was 3660 people. That’s a difference of 614 people.

What does this tell us? For the 7 day period, we had 614 people who were reached at least two times over the period.

While some bit of caution is advised for taking these numbers too deeply to heart (due to the fact that the reach metric is estimated and therefore sampled), this is one method that allows you to get a general idea of your overlap.

Reporting on Impressions

Given the challenges of correctly assessing and interpreting sampled data and manual de-deduplication, it can be easier to stick with the simpler, non-unique metrics such as Impressions.

We can validate that Impressions can be added together with no issues. We can do this by using a similar approach as the above Facebook Reach de-dupe method. This can be seen using this sample page data below:

*In this example, the Page-Level export includes columns W and AA. I’ve added Z and AB as calculated columns.

The 28-day metric can use a similar approach.

Reporting on Frequency

You can also combine these data points of Reach and Impressions to get a general idea of Daily, Weekly, and Monthly frequency levels. However, remember that frequency is an average of all impressions. Some people might be reached many times per person, and some are only reached once. You can use this method to report the overall average.

Here’s an example of the method in practice. Remember: Impressions divided by Reach equals Frequency.

*Estimated Daily Frequency and Estimated Weekly Frequency are columns that I’ve added to the spreadsheet. The Page-Level export included Daily and Weekly Reach and Impressions numbers.

Bonus (nerdy) tip: If you want to get an idea of the frequency distribution (how many people were reached one time, vs. two times, vs. three times, etc) for the Daily, Weekly, or 28 day metrics, you can find those in the additional tabs along the bottom of the page level export. You should find that the cumulative averages of these distributions are equal to the estimated method we used above.

It will look something like this:

These numbers are telling you the overall frequency distribution that your page delivered on a specific date. On June 3, this page reached 109 people 1 time, 13 people 2 times, 2 people 3 times, etc.

Monitoring Frequency

How many times your page content reaches a similar audience can be a good thing to monitor. I normally recommend paying closer attention to frequency at the ad-level (or post-level), instead of page-level.

Bigger problems can arise here when high frequency occurs and users tire of a single ad. By running many different ads (or posts) for a single page, higher levels of frequency may not be as problematic.

If it seems these frequency numbers are higher than you’d like, you could consider doing different targeting (primarily using your paid activity) to evaluate different target audiences for your content. Another option is lowering your budgets for particular ads that have higher frequency.

People often ask about the ideal frequency to mitigate these issues, and there is no simple answer to this. Facebook has published an interesting framework on thinking about frequency, which may be useful for considering your own results.

What Does this All Mean?

1. Reporting on your Facebook Page Reach has some challenges. We should fully understand what’s behind the numbers before simply adding a bunch of rows together in a spreadsheet.
2. Impressions are a safe metric you can add together with reckless abandon (mostly).
3. You can estimate Average Page Frequency. You can also investigate details on frequency distribution in Page-Level exported data.

I’ll write more in the future on Facebook Reach Post-Level reporting, which carries its own strengths and weaknesses.

Your Turn

Do you use Page Reporting? Do you have any particular challenges with comparing performance data from Paid Ads vs your Organic results?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Page Reach: Page-Level Reporting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Business Manager is an incredibly useful and powerful tool for advertisers. If you’re running Facebook and/or Instagram ads, it’s the command center of all account connections and activities. There’s no doubt it has streamlined various processes and made it much easier to connect employees and accounts.

But that said, who actually knows and understands all the complex ins and outs of Business Manager?

Let’s be honest: very few of us. 

How many of us have scratched our head when a button is inexplicably moved or a layout has been changed without notice? How many have tried to connect our organization into a Business Manager account and ended up super frustrated and needing an adult beverage?

Let’s be honest: many of us.

As a result, most advertisers successfully connect their pages, people, and pixels, and then they’re pretty much afraid to break anything so they don’t go any further. In short, most folks vastly under-utilize this essential tool.

We can do better.

When I built the first Business Manager training course last fall, I interviewed several dozen agencies and consultants about how they actually use it. I asked them to be brutally honest about the hiccups they’ve had, the mistakes they’ve made, and the ongoing issues they run into. My research led to some pretty shocking discoveries, including:

1. Multiple agencies had every employee listed as an admin of every client Facebook Page and ad account.
2. Several other agencies had employees utilizing personal profiles to connect into ad accounts via settings, therefore not using Business Manager at all.
3. My personal favorite! One consultant had hired 34 different “contractors” in Pakistan to do posting on client Facebook pages and once he fired them, he never deleted them as admins of those pages.

It’s time to get serious.

As a Facebook/Instagram advertiser today, it’s a MUST that we keep our Business Manager fully functional and up to date for not only our purposes, but for the purposes of client protection and security as well.

We all need a checkup once in a while. It keeps us healthy. It also ensures the best security on our accounts, something that’s absolutely imperative these days.

So, let’s do this.

If you want to modify almost anything within Business Manager, it has to be done via Business Settings. You can navigate to that area via Business.Facebook.com.

Once you’ve clicked on the blue button in the upper right corner, it’ll bring you into the navigational menu that you can click around in.

Step One: Clean Up Admins and Employees

Within Business Manager, we all have Admins and Employees. These are the fine people we’ve connected into our organization at some point. You can then attach them to ad accounts, pages, and other assets.

1. Admins

It’s important to remember that old employees and admins can always be removed within Business Manager. You can find these within “People” in the upper left hand side of the navigation bar under settings. Anyone that has a small badge to the right of their name is an admin.

Ask yourself: does anyone have a badge who actually shouldn’t?? Admins have a lot of power within your Business Manager, so these should be used very sparingly. I reserve these only for the Business Owners, or those controlling access to the Business Manager.

2. Employees

Your employees are users who’ve been added into the account at some point. They are likely connected to assets, such as pages and ad accounts. But should they be?

Here’s an example: I no longer work with Jackson, so I’d like to remove him. You can do this by clicking in the upper right corner of that employee record and hit “Remove.”

You can also review the ad accounts, pages, catalogs, and other assets that person is attached to. If you want to remove them from a particular account, click on the asset and then on the right hand side, click the X on the asset name.

Great work cleaning up your admins and employees!

Step Two: Disconnect Old Ad Accounts and Pages

How much time do you spend getting rid of old ad accounts and pages you’re no longer connected to? If you’re like the dozens of agencies I polled last fall, it’s not much time at all — which can be hugely problematic!

There are different excuses for not taking action and here are some of the most common:

• Agencies want to stay connected to old accounts and keep tabs on a new agency. (I do not endorse this tactic!)
• Some agencies frankly don’t know how to do it properly.
• Then there’s downright laziness, meaning some folks just don’t look at their account list in Business Manager very often.

In order to truly stand out as advertisers, we’ve got to stay on top of everything — which includes cleaning up old accounts and pages — as annoying and time-consuming as that might be.

1. Reviewing Old Ad Accounts

Reviewing your list of ad accounts is actually quite simple. Within Business Settings, you can click on Accounts and review the list under Ad Accounts.

Be sure to look at the accounts themselves. You can also review the people connected, which level of access they have, and then ask yourself if that person really needs access. If you’re an agency, consider if you need to be connected or is it just cluttering up your Business Manager.

If you need to remove yourself or your agency, you can do that by clicking “remove” in the upper right corner.

2. Reviewing Old Pages

The process for reviewing the Facebook pages you’re connected to is similar to ad accounts. You go into Business Settings, click the page you want to remove and select it from the top right corner.

Step Three: Ensure Your Pixels are Perfect

Pixels lead to some of the most frustrating scenarios within Business Manager. But if you share the pixel properly, you can attach it to an ad account, utilize it within Facebook Analytics, and dial-in your dynamic ads. So, it holds a lot of power.

1. Is the pixel shared properly?

The first thing I check on with pixels is if they are shared into the Business Manager properly. If not, this may be why you’ve run into permissions issues in the past.

Check the listing of pixels, under the data sources > pixels area. Are all your pixels showing up here?

If not, you may need to share the pixel into Business Manager. At this stage, it’s important to note a few things:

1. The person trying to share the pixel has to own it.
2. You need to share it into the Business Manager that you want to own that pixel. So if this is a client’s pixel, they need to do this within their own Business Manager.

To share, click in the upper left corner and head to Events Manager > Pixels area.

Once there, hit “details” on the pixel, which brings you into the main admin screen.

Then, hit share. This brings you back into the Business Manager pixel area we were at earlier.

2. Are Partners, People, and Ad Accounts Connected Properly?

For each pixel within your Business Manager, you can assign a partner, person, and ad account to that pixel. Review each of these and ensure things are all connected, so you have no more permissions issues. This process also ensures your pixel will work as intended.

Still tons more!

Even for those of us who have been using Business Manager for years, there’s always still tons more to learn. You can always be improving, reviewing, and ensuring security is top notch for your clients.

The post Time For a Facebook Business Manager Checkup appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The most popular post on this site is my Reference of Dimensions for Facebook Timeline For Pages. So when any changes are made that I don’t know about, I can expect to hear from you!

I had been hearing rumblings of an issue with the profile photo size, but I confirmed that the dimensions themselves hadn’t changed. I then heard from Erwin Meester of Sociaal Lokaal in the Netherlands who explained the problem.

First, here is Erwin’s image showing the issue. You’ll see that Pages that created interactive designs between their profile and cover photos suddenly noticed something was off…

The issue dumbfounded me since my measurements tell me that the dimensions of the profile photo remain the same (still 160×160). But for whatever reason, Facebook now crops even square photos by default.

If anyone has an explanation for this, let me know. But Facebook decided to not only scale my 500×500 profile photo, but crop it in. This didn’t impact my design, but it obviously would screw up the creative designs of many others.

The Solution

The solution is ridiculously simple.

1. Hover over your profile photo
2. Click “Edit Profile Picture”
3. Click “Edit Thumbnail”
4. Check the box for “Scale to fit.”

Makes no sense whatsoever. This is your profile photo, not your thumbnail. And it already scaled to a point since the original photo size was 500×500. But this seems to fix the problem.

If you have any issues, see my video at the top.

The post Facebook Page Profile Photo Problem: The Fix appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Before you get started on Facebook, you need a plan. Far too often, I see brands aimlessly posting on their Page with no clear purpose or direction.

The approach is often self-serving. Hollow. Inconsistent.

The result should be no surprise. It’s impossible to gain any traction, and the Fans you do get are uninterested and don’t engage.

So how do you assemble the ultimate Facebook Content Plan? Well, it’s time to reveal my secrets.

Below is an overview of what I tell my clients. There are 11 factors that drive a Facebook content strategy that works. Focus on these things before you get started…

[Tweet “Before posting on Facebook, you must have a plan. Here’s how you can create one that works…”]

1. Your Audience

Think about your ideal customer. Here are some questions you’ll need to ask yourself about this person:

• Are they male or female?
• How old are they?
• Where do they live?
• Are they single or married?
• Do they have children?
• How educated are they?
• What is their income?
• What do they like?
• What don’t they like?

Start drawing a picture of what this person looks like. Construct a story so that you understand their point of view.

This is your target audience. This is the person who will be the source of your inspiration.

2. Your Goals

Don’t think only about numbers. Attempt to visualize how you want your Page to look in one year. How do your customers perceive it? How many Fans are there? What drives the conversation?

Consider your competitor with the greatest presence on Facebook. What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? What could you emulate it or improve upon it?

Now consider what you want to get out of using Facebook. What is the end game? Is it brand awareness? Customer service? Nurturing raving and loyal fans?

Now you can start thinking about the stats. But you first have to consider the environment that would get you there. Are you looking to sell product? How much? How often? Are you looking to generate leads? How will you do it? How many per month? Are you looking to drive traffic to your website? What kind of impact?

Be realistic here. Make direct revenue the final goal. Start with where you want to be in one year, and then work your way back.

3. Your Voice

You’ll want to be human. But what does that mean? Once again, this will be related to your target audience. What appeals to college kids won’t necessarily appeal to seniors (obviously). That doesn’t just mean the content you share, but how you share it.

Think through how it is you will present yourself. Start by writing a one page introduction of your brand to your Fans. You’ll never share or publish it. But it will give you practice.

4. Your Resources

These are all important factors to consider when putting together your content strategy. Make a list of these resources, and within those lists create sub-lists of content ideas that they could create that would appeal to your target audience.

5. Your Assets

Again, don’t think about this from a marketing and sales perspective, but from one of providing value. What will your ideal customer like?

Once you have this master list, start breaking it up into categories. We’ll get back to this.

6. Your Value

Understand that your typical Fan will have a News Feed that is flooded with posts from 500 other friends and Pages. You need to stand out.

Will you provide discounts? Run contests? Or will you teach something and make your Fans’ lives easier?

Once again, make a list of the various things that you can do and break them into categories. Do not skimp on this step! If it’s too difficult to come up with value, you will not create a Page worth following.

7. Your Team

This is critical, particularly when it comes to consistency and voice. Sometimes, it’s better to have one person write the updates, but have a team that helps with creating the content.

8. Your Time

Be honest with yourself from the start. Do not overcommit!

9. Your Themes

10. Your Calendar

Don’t go too far. This is your initial guide, but it should be fluid.

11. Your Execution!

For the first few weeks, be as structured as possible. Make sure people have very clear roles and assignments. Who will be managing Facebook and at what times? Who will be responding to Fans? At what time will each piece of new content be written?

Eventually, you should become less rigid, but it is important to establish some routine.

Your Turn

The post 11 Factors That Drive a Facebook Content Plan That Works appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Back in August, I wrote about how you could merge Facebook Pages after converting a personal profile to a business Page. Well, Facebook has switched things up again.

The Facebook Help Center has been updated on how to merge Pages. Before we get to that, a few things you should know:

• The Pages being merged must represent the same thing
• You can only merge Pages with fewer Likes into the one with more Likes
• If you’re merging Pages with a location, they must have the same address information
• Merging Pages combines all of your Likes and check-ins
• All other content from the Page(s) with fewer Likes (wall posts, photos, username) will be permanently deleted
• Content on the Page with more Likes will remain unchanged, except for the addition of likes and check-ins added from the Page(s) with fewer Likes
• The Page(s) with fewer Likes will be removed from Facebook and you will not be able to unmerge it
• You must manage all of the Pages being merged (duh)

Okay, got it? Now let’s merge stuff. To access the merge tool, do this…

1. Of the Pages you want to merge, go to the admin panel of the Page with the most Likes
2. Edit Page > Update Info
3. Click Resources
4. Click “Request to merge duplicate Pages”

Then…

1. Select the Page that has the most Likes as the Destination Page
2. Select up to five Pages to merge into the Destination Page
3. Enjoy the merge

I’ve never done this, but it appears there will be some approval process once you submit the Pages. This makes sense given the rules at play.

This is a good opportunity for anyone who has created multiple Pages in error. Just make sure you control them all and that they have the same or similar name and the same physical address.

Good luck!

The post How to Merge Up to 6 Facebook Pages appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

November 19 Update: If you suddenly saw that your profile and cover photos don’t “fit” properly, read this! Facebook Page Profile Photo Problem: The Fix

Just when you get everything the way you want it, Facebook makes another change…

Today, a new Facebook profile photo size was rolled out for brand Pages. Formerly 125×125 pixels, Facebook has increased the size of profile photos to 160×160 pixels. In either case, the minimum size of the photo you use needs to be 180×180 pixels, but Facebook shrinks it down to the smaller size.

I know, that’s confusing. Just know that you need to pick a photo that is at least 180×180 pixels, just as before, but it will now appear as 160×160 pixels instead of 125×125 pixels.

This matters, as I discovered with a couple of my own Pages. I created a nice little montage of baseball cards on the Brewers Updates From 1982 Facebook Page, making a 1982 Topps Robin Yount card the profile photo. Sweet, right? Well, with the change, it no longer fits…

Of course, I’m not the only one with this problem. Countless other Facebook Page admins got cute with their Cover Photos and Profile Photos and now need to scramble and make adjustments.

I’m here to help. The infographic below details all of the dimensions you need to know. Which are:

• Submitted profile photo must be at least 180×180 pixels
• Facebook will shrink profile photo to 160×160 pixels (formerly 125×125)
• Including padding, profile photo area is 170×170 pixels (5 pixels all the way around)
• 23 pixels from left edge to profile photo border
• 210 pixels from top edge to profile photo border
• 658 pixels from right edge to profile photo border
• 105 pixels from bottom edge to top profile photo border

[Click the image for a close-up]

I’ve also updated the reference of all Facebook Timeline dimensions Infographic to reflect this change.

Are you having to scramble as a result of the larger profile photos? Let me know in the comments below!

The post New Facebook Profile Photo Size Impacts Cover Photos [Infographic] appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Insights is a wonderful tool when used properly. But the data is so extensive (and the updates often unreliable) that many page managers ignore their Facebook Insights completely.

The purpose of this tutorial is to not only explain why you should use your Facebook Insights but to show how you can use them to determine what and when you should post on your page for maximum effectiveness.

The Data Available in Facebook Insights

Most page managers look through what is available in the web version of Facebook Insights and stop there. The truth is that the power of Facebook Insights can be found in the downloadable spreadsheets.

Granted, this data is a bit overwhelming. Everything you can possibly want is in there. Anywhere within your Facebook Insights you can export either Page Level or Post Level data to Excel or a CSV file.

There is so much information that it’s difficult to list it all here. But I’ll try to provide an overview.

The Post Level data includes the following tabs of information:

• Key Metrics
• Talking About This Per Post, by Action Type
• Stories Created Per Post, by Action Type
• Number of People Who Click Within a Post, by Type
• Number of Clicks Within Each Post, by Type
• Number of People who Give Negative Feedback Per Post, by Type
• Number of Times Negative Feedback Given Per Post, by Type

And the Page Level data includes the following tabs of information:

• Key Metrics
• Daily Like Sources
• Daily Viral Reach by Story Type
• Weekly Viral Reach by Story Type
• 28 Days Viral Reach by Story Type
• Daily Viral Impressions by Story Type
• Weekly Viral Impressions by Story Type
• 28 Days Viral Impressions by Story Type
• Daily Total Frequency Distribution
• Weekly Total Frequency Distribution
• 28 Days Total Frequency Distribution
• And a bunch more…

There are 51 more tabs. Yeah, there’s a lot of information in there. So trust me that you can waste an entire weekend looking through it.

Determine the Best Day to Post on Facebook

Determine a period of time that you want to compare and export both the Post Level and Page Level data. I used two months, but it’s up to you.

From the Post Level data, let’s stay on the Key Metrics tab and focus on the following columns (feel free to delete the rest):

• Post ID (A)
• Message (B)
• Posted (C)
• Lifetime Post Total Reach (D)

The Page Level data provides Lifetime Total Likes in Column H of Key Metrics. This will allow you to find the percentage of Total Reach over Total Likes. This is important since the number of people you reach is significantly impacted by number of fans.

Once you find the percentage of Reach vs. Likes, you can then start sorting out what days provided the highest reach.

For me, it turns out that the best day to post is Thursday (25.1% reach) and the worst day to post is Saturday (21.6%). Not a huge discrepancy, but that 5% can make a difference.

It should be noted that I posted far more often on Thursday (26) than Saturday (7) or Sunday (9). So the weekend data can be easily skewed. Otherwise, my worst days to post are Tuesday (22.6%) and Friday (23.2%).

Determine the Best Time to Post on Facebook

What’s interesting is that 25% of my posts were between the times of 7:00 and 7:59 AM. This is above the overall average of 23.7%. So it’s not necessarily a bad decision to concentrate my posts at that time.

That said, there were certainly better times to post. I experimented recently when I heard it was best to post at less busy times, particularly at night. And that is reflected here. The best two times were from 8:00-8:59 PM (27.2%) and 10:00-10:59 PM (26.3%). These results should be taken with a grain of salt since I’ve only posted twice during each time range. But something to watch.

The two next best times to post were 12:00-12:59 PM (26.1% for eight posts) and 2:00-2:59 PM (25.7% for six posts). It looks like I should otherwise avoid posting between 8:00 AM and Noon as well as between 5:00 and 8:00 PM. These are the pockets where the lowest percentages of reach are concentrated.

I wouldn’t suggest using my data as gospel, but keep in mind that all times are Mountain if you want to take anything from this.

Determine the Best Content to Post on Facebook

The types of content I shared in this analysis are as follows:

• My Own Links (68)
• Links of Others or Guest Posts of Others (27)
• Photos (3)
• Videos (7)
• Status Updates (26)

I could have gotten lazy here and stuck with Total Reach vs. Likes. But it seems we’re trying to find something different here: The content people are most likely to engage with.

You see, if we stuck with Reach the type of content wouldn’t hold much relevance. What doesn’t matter here is whether people see it. It’s that they interact with it.

And so, in place of reach I took the total number of people who “consumed” the piece of content. A consumption includes Talking About This (which is anything that creates a story) as well as any people who register a click that doesn’t count as Talking About This (link clicks, video clicks, photo view, and other clicks).

What I found is that people engaged with photos (4.0%) much more than any other type of content (0.9% for links, 0.7% for videos and 0.6% for both status updates and links of others).

There’s an enormous caveat here. As mentioned earlier, only three photos are included in this analysis. So while those three photos were extremely successful, you can’t extrapolate these results over all photos.

What Can Be Learned

But there is still plenty to learn here. I should post more photos and see what comes of it. I should also continue the experiment of posting later at night (and this is going to be part of that experiment!). I should avoid posting in the middle of the morning and evening, and I should lighten up on status updates and links of others.

That’s what I see. What can you learn from your Facebook Insights?

The post How Facebook Insights Tells What and When to Post appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

NOTE: A NEW infographic has been created with updated dimensions for Timeline, News Feed, mobile, desktop, posts and ads. It’s the only infographic you’ll need for Facebook dimensions! SEE IT HERE.

Now that Facebook Timeline for Pages is a reality, it’s important to optimize it by using the proper image sizes. So below I’ve put together an infographic (feel free to pin it!) that highlights the appropriate dimensions for the following:

• Cover Photo
• Profile Photo
• Custom Tab Photo or Logo
• Shared Photo
• Highlighted Photo
• Milestone Photo
• Custom Tab Page

So, here it is. All of the dimensions for Facebook Timeline for Pages that you’ll need. Feel free to bookmark and share for future reference!

Also See: The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Timeline For Pages
Timeline Dimensions, Cover Photo Rules, Free Tab Icons,
How to Choose and Execute Apps and MORE!

Pin It

The post Reference of Dimensions for Facebook Timeline For Pages [Infographic] appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Places give users the ability to “check-in” and tell their friends where they are and what they’re doing at a given moment. We’ll get into the benefits of Facebook Places at another time, but this tutorial focuses on creating or claiming your Place.

If your business has a physical location, you should create a Facebook Place. If you have regular foot traffic at your place of business, it’s possible a Place has already been created, but you should claim and take ownership of that Place.

Check In

YES! Your Facebook Place has been added!

If you don’t see your business, type it into the search just in case. If nothing comes up, it will say “Add ‘[Business Name]’. Go ahead and click that. From there, you’ll add some basics about your business to officially add your Place. When you’re done, check in for fun!

Claim Your Place

Go to Facebook on your computer and type the name of your business into the search. If you don’t see it immediately, filter to Pages. Make sure you find the new Place that you created and not another page.

On the left hand side, you’ll see links for “Is this your business?” and “Do you know the owner?”. If you aren’t the owner, click the “Do you know the owner?” link to let them know that they can claim their place. Otherwise, if you own the business click on the other link.

Important: What you are going to do next is convert this Place into a Facebook Page. If you already have a Facebook Page, you’ll be able to merge the two listings on the second step. Make sure you read the instructions closely so that you don’t miss it.

Is this your Facebook Place? Claim it!

Good luck!

The post How to Create or Claim a Place on Facebook appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.