Ahh the million dollar question.
As you know Facebook advertising is one of the most effective ways to promote your products and services to a targeted audience. You know that the social media platform is the perfect place to share your brand message, but how long should it take you to get your message across?
Finding the optimal length or ad copy is an issue that confuses thousands of business owners. Here’s all you need to know ahead of running your next Facebook marketing campaign.
Understanding the changing landscape
If you plan to use Facebook and Instagram marketing, you must appreciate how the platforms work.
The social media sites are always evolving, and one of the recent updates means that just two lines of text will be visible (one headline and the first line of copy) on the initial ad. Users will need to click the ‘see more’ button to keep reading the content – so you need to grab their attention right away.
The words included within those opening two lines will depend on what you are trying to achieve. An ad aimed at selling sale items quickly will be vastly different from one that wants clients to download a free guide. You want to quickly grab attention with an offer, a call out for your audience or a question. And your headline should be the main reason they would want to click ‘shop now’ or ‘learn more’. Plus, feel free to thrown in an emoji or two for extra attention – just don’t over do it.
Understanding your audience
When running a Facebook campaign (or any ad for that matter), you need to ask “who is it aimed at?” as this will have a huge influence on the length of your copy.
Audiences can be broken into three main categories:
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Retargeting – sending a campaign to audiences that have recently been to your website or engaged with your content.
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Warm audiences – people that have recently engaged with the brand in a meaningful way.
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Cold audiences – readers that have not previously engaged with the brand.
As a rule of thumb, retargeting ads should be short and sweet as you are trying to win back a prospective client that abandoned a transaction. Cold audiences need to be engaged within 8 seconds due to our short attention spans, so a paragraph or two should suffice.
However, sometimes it can be worth testing a longer form retargeting ad if you haven’t educated potential clients enough on why they should act. And sometimes a short and sweet cold audience ad can gain enough intrigue to work.
Conversely, warm audiences know and enjoy the brand and may be willing to stay on the page for a little longer. It is still Facebook, though, so an essay is unlikely to work.
Understanding the importance of analysis
Short, snappy content that has a clear call-to-action will work best. However, there are no exact word counts set in stone. Moreover, contributing factors like your industry, location, and target audience will all impact the outcome.
While it’s smart to have a rough guideline in place, learning to track the performance of different ad copy through split testing is highly advised. This will soon clear up which method your audience responds to best.
Still, if you can express your message in two sentences, do it. If you need a paragraph or longer, that’s fine too. Play an active role, and you will find the recipe for success.
So, how long should your ad copy be?
The moral of the story, there isn’t a set ad copy length. I wish I could tell you that 72 words and 2 emojis was the perfect number. But I can’t. The important thing is you get the message across, as quickly as possible, engage prospective clients, and don’t swarm them with a mass of text. Then test, test and test to find what works best for your audience. Check out our blog on split testing if you’re not sure how to test.
If you need help with any aspects of Facebook marketing or ecommerce marketing, then please get in touch with us today. The team at Bright Red Marketing will assist you with all your concerns, helping to develop a winning strategy.
