Facebook has more than 2 billion active users, and Instagram (all by itself) has more than 800 million monthly active users, according to Sproutsocial.
Stop and consider that for a moment: You could be selling toys to giant locomotives or hairbrushes to complicated B2B software systems. If you have a business, there’s an audience on Facebook and Instagram for your business.
If you told us that Facebook was just for B2C (and not B2B), we could agree back in the old days. But not anymore.
Almost everyone is on Facebook or Instagram or both. If you are serious about driving traffic to your website, you might have considered Facebook advertising. More than 93% of marketers are already using Facebook advertising, according to Social Media Examiner.
But things are changing so fast with Facebook advertising that we could all be easily lost in the breakneck speed at which Facebook makes changes to its advertising platform, introduces new features, and works on adding new ways to reach your audiences.
Managing Facebook ads is not easy, thanks to all those different ways available to advertise on Facebook. There are so many mind-numbing decisions you have to make such as choosing the right objective, choosing the right format for your ad, and making sure you are doing everything right with your ads and sales funnels, and more.
As things change fast, it may be that you missed the boat on a few Facebook and Instagram ad formats which work exceptionally well and are also great in terms of your audience’s experience with ads. Here are some of them:
Facebook Video Ads
We are aware that you know video is singularly the most important medium for advertising (and many other use cases).
We can bet though that you aren’t using videos as well as you could. We are willing to extend that bet to using videos for Facebook ads too.
Facebook allows you to snap two or three images together to create a slideshow (this is built into Facebook and is as basic as it gets). Or you could create your own branded videos as ads and launch campaigns.
Using video gets you better engagement and makes your ads that much more “sticky”. Facebook allows you to use the regular video format (landscape), the vertical video format, and also the 360 degrees format.
Facebook Collections
With more than 1.12 billion mobile users on Facebook, it’s an audience that checks Facebook on mobile everyday. About 19% of all the time spent on a smart phone is on Facebook, on average.
If you are a retailer, an e-commerce store, or a business that sells products and services,
Facebook collections are immersive experiences (built for mobile) that can make your ads very interesting, engaging, relevant, and built exactly to engage with Facebook mobile users.
Facebook collections are built for e-commerce and they usually start with a video, an attractive image, or a 360 degrees image followed by individual product images. On click, users are sent straight to your online store where they can make a purchase (which is attributed and tracked from inside your fa or Power editor).
Facebook Canvas
With a huge push to attract Facebook’s ever-growing base of mobile users, Facebook Canvas is suitable for all businesses to showcase products or services or to create interactive experiences to let the world know more about your brand.
Facebook Canvas ads look like a regular image or video ad until users click on them. Once they do, the ad opens up into a full-screen mobile experience revealing a mix of multimedia (including headlines, copy, and Call to action buttons).
Essentially, Facebook Canvas is a full-screen, completely mobile-optimized landing page experience (and you can create the landing page from scratch with exactly what you want on it).
Instagram Stories
Instagram stories — it’s easy enough to guess — was built for brands and businesses to showcase their services, products, or brands on Instagram.
More than 20% of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from Instagram (in case you were second-guessing the platform).
According to GetMeasured, engagement rates for content are 15 times higher than on Facebook (and 20 times higher than on Twitter).
The basic format of Instagram stories combines the “vertical video” format or the “square video” format embedded into the stories feature of Instagram. On Instagram, it’s a full-screen vertical format and brands use Instagram stories in various ways to gain reach, engagement, clicks, leads, and sales.
Each of the ad formats above are high-impact creatives that can easily help you engage with your potential audience better than regular ads can. Agreed that you’d need the necessary creatives and the commitment to see these campaigns take shape but if and when you do, your advertising efforts get to another level.
Which of these Facebook and Instagram ad formats have you used? If you did, what were the results like? Please do share them with us.
Next Step
These new ad types are the key to starting or saving your Facebook campaigns. Rocking these things early on will launch you out of the gate fast and put a lot of audience data behind you. If you’ve got campaigns that are cooling off – then working some of these new ad formats may be the key to bring your sales back in line.
Either way, if you need more sales, Facebook Ads are a great way to get them. And, we can help. Watch this short video and you’ll see exactly what to do next!