How to Get 122 Shares on Your Next Facebook Ad

There are certain ads that are hard to resist. You’ve seen them, I’m sure. They make you stop in your Facebook-scrolling tracks.

It happened to me a couple months ago, and I’ve been thinking about this Facebook ad ever since.

The ad in question promoted something called the Elegant Excellence Experience, a part of Hilary Rushford’s recent launch. Here’s a screenshot taken from my phone:

What made me flip for this ad? The copy’s strong, sure, and the image is certainly appealing. I’m a sucker for a good font, so I welcome any image that looks like this in my feed.

But what REALLY blew me away – and I’m gonna guess this is what stops you in your tracks when you see something similar – is the number of likes, “reactions,” comments and shares this ad got.

The Subtle But Serious Effect of All That Engagement

You probably don’t need me to tell you that any post on Facebook that already has a lot of engagement impacts the way you respond to it.

Ever find yourself liking someone’s post because you see lots of people have already liked it? Or decided to hit “like” instead of “love” because you’d be the first one?

Yup – social proof is STRONG. Our actions online are influenced by those around us. Herd mentality is a thing!

3 Ingredients for Ads with Serious Social Proof

Wondering why some ads seem to get tidal waves of engagement and not others?

It’s generally a combination of a few things:

1. The business behind the ad has raving fans (and lots of them).
2. The ad itself is outstanding, often addressing some pain point or deep desire of its target audience.
3. There’s a LOT of money being poured into that Facebook ad campaign.

It’s this third factor that’s important for you to recognize. The budget of a campaign is behind-the-scenes info that’s impossible to guess just from looking at an ad. But when you see that level of engagement, it’s a pretty safe assumption that the ad’s been running for a while, the daily spend is quite high, or both.

A Simple Hack to Boost Your Ads’ Engagement Without Tripling Your Budget

When you’ve got an ad that you know will work (because you’ve already seen the results it got in a previous campaign, for example), this little strategy will help it do even better. Essentially you’re going to amp up your engagement – and therefore your social proof – before running the ad to cold audiences.

Here’s how:

1. Post a link to whatever you want to promote to your Facebook page. Include ad copy that gets the right people to click and make sure the image your link pulls is the one you want in your ad. If it’s not the image you want, you can change it by hitting the + button at the bottom of the post.
2. Boost that post for 24-48 hours, depending on your budget. You can spend as little as $5 for 24 hours if you want! In the settings, make sure you’re only selecting your fans in the target audience.
3. In the Audiences section of your Ads Manager, create custom audiences out of your existing subscribers and the people who have visited your website. (For detailed, up-to-date instructions on this step, grab a copy of Absolute FB Ads.)
4. Turn your Facebook post into an ad (choose the objective “post engagement”) that targets both of the above custom audiences. Spend another $5 per day and run this ad for 2 days.
5. After the ads from steps #3 and #4 have run for 24-48 hours, that original post on your Facebook page should have more likes on it. If you’re lucky, maybe it even got some “reactions,” comments and shares! Now you can turn that same post into an ad that targets people who haven’t interacted with your brand yet. (More on Facebook ad targeting here.)

You should spend most of your budget on targeting new people, but if you show them an ad that has a lot of engagement on it already, the social proof will almost definitely work in your favor.

I want to be clear: I’m not suggesting that this is the technique that Hilary and her team used to get so much engagement on this Facebook ad. But my guess is that a whole lot of those likes and shares came from people who were already big fans of hers.

Does that matter? NOPE. All you see when scrolling past this ad is that insanely high engagement, and it makes you think, “DAMN GIRL! Everyone loves her! I better not miss out on this Elegant Excellence Experience thing!” So you click and sign up. #theFOMOeffect

See? I told you social proof was a powerful thing.

BONUS HACK:

I spotted another ad with insane engagement numbers right before hitting publish on this post. When I discovered the “trick” to it, I knew I had to share it with you.

Here’s the ad from Brilliant Business Moms:

I thought I had seen this ad before, and out of sheer curiosity, I started scrolling through the comments. Based on a few exchanges I saw there, I discovered this very smart technique:

The ad promotes a webinar, one that this business owner appears to run somewhat frequently. But instead of creating a new ad every time she runs it, she keeps the same ad (that keeps getting more and more engagement), and changes the content of the sign-up page to reflect the new date. 

She doesn’t change the text, the image, or the link. If you try to edit your ad and make any of those changes, the engagement resets to zero.

Instead, she just updates her sign-up page on the same url this ad is pointing to.

Brilliant indeed!

So those are two simple hacks you can use to boost engagement on your Facebook ads, and get a higher click-through rate as a result.

Got any other Facebook ad hacks that are working for you? Let us know in the comments below!