HootSuite Launches Facebook Ads, An Ad Tech Tool For Humans
Social management platform rolls out free feature that suggests the best Facebook posts to promote and automatically optimizes campaigns.
There’s little simple about ad tech, but HootSuite aims to strip away some of the complications with a new Facebook ad tool that it’s launching today.
Most marketers have come to terms with the fact that the free ride on Facebook is over; that some ad spending is necessary if you want to reach enough people on the social network. The question is when and how to spend, a complexity that many social media professionals don’t have expertise in — or time to spend researching.
The HootSuite solution — called Facebook Ads — automates the Facebook ad creation process by analyzing posts by a user or Facebook Page and suggesting the best candidates for promotion. Users pick one of four objectives — reaching more people to build awareness, gaining fans/followers, maximizing engagement or driving referral traffic — and the tool ranks which posts “you should be promoting to get the most bang for your buck,” HootSuite vp of business development Gregory Gunn told Marketing Land.
Gunn said the best posts to promote are those that already are doing well.
“One of the biggest hurdles a new advertiser or light advertiser has is that they always want to promote the content that is not performing,” Gunn said, “and that’s actually not the proper strategy.”
Once the user selects a post to promote, the HootSuite backend automatically handles the ad placing, bidding and targeting details. The tool also allows for adjustments if a user chooses.
Gunn said the tool fills a void in the ad tech marketplace. With major players like Kenshoo and Nanigans concentrating on enterprise solutions, there’s little support for social media generalists, those working in organizations of all sizes. Such people will have more authority to make social ad buying decisions in the future, Gunn believes. If he’s correct, then the new tool is positioned nicely because many people in those roles already use HootSuite, which with 10 million users is the world’s most widely used social management platform.
“It something that’s being built and designed for practitioners and content marketers, the folks who really rely on HootSuite for their organic social media management,” he said. “We have actually built an ad tech tool for them.”
Here’s a HootSuite video that demonstrates the tool:
The tool is free and immediately available today for HootSuite pro and free users. Enterprise users can have it switched on by calling their account representative.
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