You can stop the likes campaign after you get 100 New Likes Or you can keep it going to grow your following.
If you need images, Check out Envato. We use it a lot.
Don’t forget to use the “If you LOVE [related niche], Like our page! 😍” as your primary text!
Warming up your Pixel
Followers and Likes are important to letting these channels know you are a real business. When your first action is to run ads, without any warm up, you can trigger the Facebook Bots to question your intent, and end up getting your accounts disabled. We’ll combat that by starting a very small “Likes” campaign on Facebook.
This will accomplish a few things:
You’ll have a following that’s growing
You’ll get charged once or twice on your credit card (validating your account)
You’ll have more people see your posts
Warning: YOU WILL GET DISABLED OR RESTRICTED IF YOU SKIP THIS STEP
Setting up a “Likes” Campaign
From your Business page, Go to “Ads Manager”
Create a new campaign, and give it an identifiable name you’ll remember later. For example, “Likes in North America” is nice and descriptive, and you’re not likely to be confused later on. Set the campaign to “Engagement” and click next.
Set up the Ad Set
Name the ad set “First Likes Campaign”. Set the Conversion Goal to Facebook Page so when users click the ad, it drives them back to your Facebook page.
Set your daily budget to between $3 and $10. The more you spend the more likes you should generate, but your monthly cost will go up as well. In most cases, $3 is more than sufficient, but spending over $10 quickly becomes a waste when you’re not established and have no product to sell.
For this campaign, you want a large audience that’s fairly broad. Choose an age range, location and under “Detailed Targeting” add a large interest or job title. For example: “nurses” or “engineers” or “kayaking” or “computer engineers”. This helps to attract your target customers. Staying broad at this point tends to make these campaigns more effective to start, and we’ll narrow our audience when we refine and test our product specific messaging.
You can also add other locations to the campaign to expand your reach. Try adding Canada, United States, and Europe, if they’re applicable to where you’ll start selling your product or service.
Click Next to create your first ad for this set.
Name the Ad, then under “Ad Creative” add simple Primary text like:
“If you love (niche), LIKE our page” or
“If you can’t get enough about (niche), LIKE our page”
Try adding an emoji at the front or back (or both) of this description. Depending on the audience, this may help.
Lastly, add an image or video. Remember, you can get images for free at https://pexels.com, https://pixabay.com, or https://unsplash.com.
Once you think of some good keywords for image searches, download about 10-15 more images you’ll use in the rest of this ad campaign.
The purpose of the image is to get people to stop scrolling, so flashy and shocking can be effective. It’s not about driving sales right now – it’s about creating interest.
As an example, one client who ran a SaaS bookkeeping solution got the most likes at the cheapest price using a closeup of a baboon for their ad.
Crop the images to be square, and at least 800×800
Don’t forget to click tracking and connect your pixel – if you forget, we’ll lose all the data we’re trying to gather with this ad.
That’s it! Your first ad is ready to go. But… it’s an ad set. So let’s go ahead and copy that ad about 10 more times.
Then, edit each ad to have a new image or video and name that ad based on the image (or video) to help you keep track of which is which. This will be important later.
Publish the campaign, ad set and ads by pressing the publish button.
Waiting for Approval
Waiting for your ads to be approved can be stressful, especially when it feels like it is taking so long that something must be wrong. Just remember that most ads get approved! You can do a spot-check to ensure you’re not including things that could be risky like:
Too much skin or too sexual
Demeaning to a group
Offensive
Political tones
knives, guns or weapons
Either way, it will take some time for your first ads to be approved.
They will go into “Processing”, then “Under Review” and when they are approved you will see them in the ad set as “Campaign Off”. This is because we paused the campaign so we could control when it starts.
When we test pain points we should wait for all ads to be approved before we turn on the campaign, to ensure we’re reducing the variables for interest in the content (Morning vs. Night for example). For the Likes campaign however, it doesn’t matter as much. Turn the campaign on, and check that the ad set, and all ads are on.
At this point, your ads might go into the “Learning” stage. In theory it’s the Facebook algorithm trying to figure out which people in your audience are most likely to engage with your content. It will slow traffic while it figures this out and can take anywhere from six hours to four days. Just be patient, things will get moving without a hitch on their own.
The first day, your cost per like will be the highest, as Facebook tries to determine who is most likely to engage with your content. Over the next few days, the cost per like will decrease as the algorithm refines your reach.
You will notice that Facebook will start sending traffic to 4-5 ads more than the others because they are either testing your engagement, or find those ads to be the most effective.
After 3-4 days, turn off the ads that cost the most (and are probably producing the least amount of likes). This will allocate more budget to the winning ‘Like’ ads, giving you more ad testing for the same budget without burning money on the failures.
After 10 days, pause all the ads except the best performing one or two.
