How to increase engagement and messages on Facebook using Ads?

In this article, I will tell you, how to increase engagement on Facebook and how to get more messages on the Facebook page. We can do this by taking advantage of Facebook Messenger Ads by running only the engagement campaign.

For better understanding, I will tell how to create a single image Ad, second, Engagement Ad, and finally, running only engagement campaigns and generating messages.

Creating a single image Ad

Objective: Create a campaign with a single image ad for the objective called ‘Messages’ to interact with the audience in messenger to tell them about our Cloud Solutions Workshop Event.

After creating Campaign and Ad Set (Detailed Targeting), in the Ad, optimize the below options:

Identity: Select a Page (your workshop related FB page)

Format: Single Image;

Ad Creative: upload image (you can edit or change image)

Call to Action: Contact Us

Setup the Messenger: Optimize the settings so that people will start a conversation with your business in Messenger after they click on your ad.

Create New > Edit (Optimize settings like Greetings and Customer Actions) and check the preview in Messenger before you save and Finish.

Greetings: Send a message to people to start the conversation with a text greeting and optional image or video.

Customer Actions: Suggest questions or replies for customers to tap, or use a button to send people to your site.

So the Ad preview will look like the below (See the below image). Once people click on Contact us(CTA Button) they will receive a message in Messenger that we have created in Messenger Setup. We can build a conversation with them from there.

Increasing engagement and messages on Facebook
Increasing engagement and messages on Facebook

Once we set up Conversion Tracking like FB Pixel, we can Review and Publish the Campaign.

Facebook Engagement Ads

Campaign Objective: Engagement.

Process: Post a popular psychological question (see below image for reference) that many people know, and target the right people, check all the comments and reply to everyone in the comments. Now, this is an extremely effective way of growing the audience. Set up the right demographics in Ad set level.

Facebook Engagement Ads
increasing engagement and messages on Facebook

Make sure the creative(image/video/audio) you are using is not violating copyrights. Recommended not to use a call to action button as our objective is post engagement.

Once the Ad is created and published, reply first on Facebook comments and afterward send them a message with an offer.

Creating Engagement/Messages Ads

  1. In this section, we try to build a connection between engagement and message ads and how we can get extremely cheap messages. We start out by creating Engagement Campaign and then turn it in the process into a message Ad. This technique is much cheaper than we start with a message.
  2. So, first, create an Engagement Ad.
  3. When you target worldwide you get the cheapest of cheapest traffic. So basically, the Facebook algorithm is going to look for extremely cheap traffic all over the world.
  4. Setup Location type in “Worldwide” and exclude California (extremely expensive to advertise in this state). Target people very young, like 13-21 Years. Language: none; Interest: Technology (kind of); Placements: Only choose Facebook Feeds (Nothing Else).
  5. Since this is the Engagement campaign, FB displays ‘Estimated Daily Results Reach’ and ‘Post Engagement’ Reach on the right sidebar. With a very minimum budget, the Estimated Daily Results Reach would be around: 8k to 50k, Post Engagement: 2.6k to 16k (Approximate Values).
  6. Create a single Image. Create a photo that is related to Technology, that contains a curious question. Upload to Ad and write an attractive Text.
  7. Call to Action: Send Message.
  8. Click confirm and start running and monitoring the ad.
  9. Here, on one hand, we, of course, generate engagement but on the other hand, we also generate as many messages as possible.

So the point here is, the Facebook algorithm charges you more for simple message ads than it charges you for engagement ads. So, what we did here is we create an engagement ad and through that engagement, we are telling users to send us a message, that’s so cheaper than just generating or just setting a message ad.