The War on Fake News has Come for Your Ad Budget

Why can’t I edit my Facebook links anymore in ad manager?

Over the past year or so Facebook noted a trend: people were creating websites that appeared to contain legitimate (often sensational) news articles along with lots of ad space. To drive significant amounts of traffic to their sites, operators purchased Facebook ads and created bait-and-switch headlines, descriptions, and images that essentially tricked readers into visiting articles and websites they didn’t expect.

As one of many steps in an ongoing campaign against fake news, Facebook has started the process of disabling the ability of Facebook Page accounts to edit previews of a link.

Up until now, you had been able to edit the headlines, description, and images of your links to best target your audience. While legitimate businesses used this functionality to A/B test, tailor content to different audiences, and keep concise, consistent branding, these false, misleading links spread misinformation and created legions of frustrated Facebook users.

This move will be a win for Facebook users. Knowing that you see information that exists on the page you see once you click on the link means that you will be more likely to trust the links you do see and clicking on them will mean getting the information you have an interest in – not something entirely different or even offensive.

Ultimately, this will be fantastic for your Facebook advertising dollars. Building greater levels of integrity into the system builds user trust and generates more engagement with the audience. Before we get to that point, you will need to make some changes to get your ads working for you.

Will this affect my Facebook Ads?

Absolutely. In making this change, Facebook removed the following fields in the ad setup process: Link Headline, Display Link, Description, and Picture. Without the ability to edit and customize that information, the link information will automatically default to what the Facebook Crawler’s best guess is as to the headline, description, and preview image.

This change means your ad may not look the way you want it to, and there will be little way to alter the appearance of the ad. Worse – it means anytime a link to your website gets shared, only the default look gets shown. If you do not correct this, you risk losing control of your brand identity across social media.

Luckily, Facebook has a solution for this. Meet the long ignored Open Graph Tags (OG Tags).  OG Tags allow you to mark up your content with the descriptive metadata you want to present whenever your URL gets shared on Facebook. Introduced by Facebook in 2010, Open Graph Tags have now been adopted as the standard for social media sites.

By implementing these tags you can take back control of your titles, descriptions, images, and more while increasing your social-media generated online traffic.

Get ahead of the change by installing OG Tag functionality on your website.

At Top Floor, we can work with you install social media open graph tag functionality on your website, create the tags for each core page of your website – including titles and descriptions optimized to achieve prime clicks from your social accounts.  We will even include a step-by-step e-book that will provide guidelines for adding OG tags to blog posts, articles, infographics, and more – along with our top tips.

If you want to elevate your results and take it one step further, Top Floor will design five branded, graphic templates for social media to create a clear brand identity and voice throughout all social media platforms. We will also create new images based on those template designs for each core page of your website. This premium solution creates a consistent look, feel, and voice of your brand and builds trust across all social media platforms.

Packages start at $1700 for our basic solution and at $3000 for our premium, branded solution. Contact us today to get started.

Contact us today, and we can get your website and social media performing at peak levels today while your competition is still working out how to solve this problem!