“Facebook carousel ads are outperforming link ads.”
You hear this statement over and over. Is it true? Will Facebook carousel ads outperform your link ads? To be honest, I don’t know. You’ll need to test and see whether this applies to your industry, niche, or products too.
Running carousel ads on Facebook that showcase multiple images with a destination URL most certainly outperform my link ads. Furthermore, this also applies to my clients who have tested Facebook carousel ads. For them, and for me, the statement is true.
Related: 10 Eye-Opening Facebook Advertising Facts
And now, Facebook has added this very same carousel format to its organic features. For those of you who want to start experimenting with this new option, here’s what you need to do.
How to Create an Organic Post Using the Facebook Carousel Format
Let’s start this quick journey by going through the four Photo/Video options currently available on your fan page.
- Upload Photos/Videos: This is the oldest feature available within the Photo/Video section. You can add photos or videos to your status.
- Create Photo Album: You can upload multiple photos and create an album.
- Create a Photo Carousel: This is the latest add-on we’re going to talk about.
- Create Slideshow: Just like a Facebook slideshow ad, you can now add up to 7 photos to your status and create a short video.
Here’s what these four features look like…
Follow these steps when creating an organic Facebook carousel post:
1. Click on “Create a Photo Carousel” and add a destination URL.
Note that photos will be automatically taken from the website you’ve chosen. Not to worry though, as you can add new photos and deactivate the once that were pulled from your URL anytime in the process.
2. Next, have a look at the images that were pulled in and if you don’t like them, simply click to remove from carousel.
Go to the “plus” sign and upload new photos to replace the ones from your website and / or add these new ones to the carousel.
You don’t like the order the images are displayed?
No problem. Simply drag the images in the order you see fit.
3. Adjust or change the destination URL of each image.
You do that by hovering over the image and editing the URL. Place the URL you want your image to link to and confirm.
EXAMPLE
For example, I uploaded three different images to my carousel post that weren’t originally on my website. After that, I edited the destination URL of each image and added the according blog post URL thus ensuring people are forwarded to the right article.
This is what my organic Facebook carousel post looks like…
One more thing…
The last image in your carousel will always display your logo – that is the profile picture of your Facebook fan page. Furthermore, the destination URL of this image will always be the one you placed when building the post from scratch. So far, you can’t edit this URL. Therefore make sure you choose the right destination URL when creating your carousel post.
Bet on Your Strengths
What exactly do I mean by that?
Find out what your best performing blog posts are and share the top 3-5 articles as a carousel photo post.
Don’t know what your best blogs are?
Use Buzzsumo to find the most shared content for a domain.
The free version of Buzzsumo will provide you with your top 5 most shared blog posts. The tool takes into consideration the shares that were generated from the following major social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+.
Wrapping It Up
Digital marketing can be a daunting task, especially when you need to juggle several social media channels and find it tough to prioritize.
Yes, it’s important to go where your audience is.
Yes, it’s crucial to understand your audience’s biggest problems, challenges, frustrations and desires.
Yes, it’s critical to pick the right channels (both online and offline), establish powerful marketing systems and consistent processes to create predictable results.
Last but not least, it’s clever to look for places that allow you to test things out, so that you can tweak individual components thus improving your outcomes and reaching your goals faster. Facebook enables you to do just that.
Facebook enables you to tailor different messages to different audiences, to test different creative variations and post types. Understanding what works and what not puts you in the driving seat of your business.
What do you think about the new Facebook carousel format?
Image: Pexels / Pixabay.com
