In the world of Facebook advertising, there is a huge difference between what intuitively makes sense...and what actually works. Understanding that difference is usually what separates the casual media buyer from the professional. In this post, we debunk a handful of Facebook advertising myths using real-life data.

I should totally target the friends of my fans! Leverage those social networks!This is the kind of thing that sounds great in a meeting. Throw some buzzwords around it, talk about network nodes, and voilà! You've got a great campaign! But you might be surprised to learn that friends of fans performed 42% under campaign averages in our testing. Truthfully, we don’t even recommend them to clients anymore. On second glance, you start to realize what a bad idea it is. Consider for a moment how many different people are in your own network. Just because you like something, doesn’t mean your mom or your high school sweetheart will. Targeting based off of friends of fans is hardly targeting at all.I need light, breezy images for my campaign! Everyone wants light assets to give a feeling of warmth on their Facebook page. But in reality, you need to embrace the darkness. We’ve talked about this at length in other posts where our research saw a 12% lift when darker backgrounds were used. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that what looks good in a vacuum is going to look good or, more importantly, stand out in the newsfeed.I don’t have a huge budget, so I should just switch to an Always-On StrategyAn always-on strategy is great… if you can afford it. Facebook, like anything else, has statistical lower limits when it comes to spend. In the past we’ve compared organic lifts that a page will experience as a result of ad spend. Pages with light spends (where you’re spending a couple hundred bucks a day) were actually punished for their light spend – showing no real lift over their averages. Pages with heavy spends (thousands of dollars daily) saw a 65% lift. Put simply, you’ll make bigger waves if you throw a boulder into a lake, instead of waking up every day to toss in a pebble.

The more keywords the better, right?Actually, no. Too many keywords in one category is a bad thing. The more keywords you add, the more duplication you see, and your reach will not grow additively. If a few of those keywords have low reach and you’re hitting those users over and over or they don’t respond well, then your overall category performance is going to take a hit.Any click estimate is better than no estimate at all right?The most tenuous part of any media negotiation is the estimate. If we’re talking to a client in a well-defined vertical that is running a campaign with known quantities, that usually isn’t a problem. But the truth is that there are campaigns that are entirely unique. We don’t know how an ad set featuring veterinarians with a conversion goal is going to do and we’ll do more damage to the campaign by pretending that we do. Instead, we always suggest running a small test budget to give an estimate based off performance as opposed to conjecture.Want more tips and tricks for how to dominate social this year with Data, Creative and Amplification? Download our 2016 Social Media Survival Guide.