One promise I made myself after graduating just over a year ago was that I never wanted to stop learning. In the digital world, we are always teaching ourselves about certain trends and how to do things better …. Always! 

A personal goal that our social media team has set ourselves is to get Facebook Blueprint Certified. Facebook Blueprint is a free resource of fast courses to educate business owners, sales reps and anyone interested in how Facebook will benefit them. There are tips on how to drive ticket sales to events, photo taking tips for when your ads show up on Instagram, and explanation of newer Facebook terms such as Audience Network.

Our job at Glacier Media Digital is to make the job easier for business owners. This means we educate ourselves on the best strategy for advertising objectives to better understand how analytics form the ad.

If you have a few minutes throughout your day, I highly recommend you try out some of the following courses (consider it your homework!). Each course is made up of 4-minute modules, and you can pace yourself throughout.

Introduction to Instagram (4 minutes)

Instagram is by far, my personal favourite platform. Learn the basics!

How to Buy Instagram Ads (14 minutes)

This may seem a lot more complicated than it sounds. Advertisers can actually build Instagram and Instagram Story ads in the same application where we build Facebook ads. Some things that we may forget about is the type of audience on Instagram and the type of experience they expect when scrolling through their newsfeeds. An important tip to remember: IG is a visual-based experience on your phone, so keep your ads that way!

Video Views/Video Ads (8 minutes)

Did you know that people are more likely to stop and look at an ad if there is a video component to it? Learn more about it in this course.

How Was I Charged for My Facebook Ads (6 minutes)

When we set-up ad accounts, it is always best practice to make sure the ad spend is directly attached to the client’s payment method, similar to how we set-up accounts with SEM. This may be a bit of a concern in the first place. In this course, you will learn the answers to some of those questions you’ve encountered about billing.

Audience Insights (18 minutes)

Facebook has a number of tools set-up to collect valuable (and sometimes creepy) information about the people using Facebook. This data is actually really helpful to advertisers because it will allow us to target the right ads to the right audience, which will clearly increase the chances of getting noticed and perhaps gaining a new customer.

Ad Policies for Content, Creative, and Targeting (24 minutes)

Nothing is more frustrating to me than when a Facebook ad is not approved, and there is no explanation why. Facebook has a strict policy for their ad requirements. You can’t have too much text, you can’t have unrealistic body image displayed on your ads, you have to be careful with the wording – there are just so many rules!

Extend Your Campaign’s Reach with Audience Network (28 minutes)

This is a feature that many businesses don’t know enough about just yet. It’s still a relatively new feature for Canada. The Audience Network enables advertisers to display their ads on approved third-party mobile apps and websites. In this course, you will learn how to utilize this.