How to Reuse Facebook Ads With Social Proof [Step-by-Step Video]

In this post:

• Why social proof matters for Facebook ads
• How to use your ad's social proof for a different audience [step-by-step tutorial]

We love Facebook advertising as a marketing tool, and a Facebook ad that gets a lot of likes, shares or comments, is a HUGE asset. This type of engagement is called “social proof,” and it can turn your ad from drab to fab by rolling over your hard-earned reacts and comments. 

Social proof is like a Jedi mind trick for your audience - they inherently TRUST more when there's strength in numbers.

But what happens when you try to duplicate your high performing ad and show it to a new audience? All of those likes, shares and comments are GONE!

In this tutorial post, we’ll walk you through how to re-use those high performers over and over again across different audiences without losing all your precious social proof.

Ads With Engagement Are Powerful Assets

One of the most powerful assets that you have as a Facebook advertiser is an ad that gets a lot of engagement.

Shares, likes, comments—all of that creates what we call social proof.

It builds trust with the people that you're trying to reach. It shows them that there's been a positive response to what you're putting out there and it really helps create a more effective ad.

Here's the kicker, though: when Facebook advertisers try to reuse those ads, oftentimes they lose all of those likes, shares, and comments all of the social proof.

Never fear! We have a quick fix for using those same high performing ads against new audiences without losing all of that social proof on the ad.

6 Steps to Reusing Your Ad's Social Proof For a Different Audience

Now, let's walk through the 6 easy steps it takes to reuse ads with the most social proof. 👇

Step 1: Create a dark post

Now in order for this tactic to work, you have to create a dark post. Essentially, that means you're creating a post that's just not public or published on your page. You can learn how to create dark post on Facebook in this easy-to-follow 3 minute tutorial from Jon Loomer. 

What the dark post allows you to do is:

• Split test against different audiences
• Increase your ad reach
• Test different creatives

All without losing the social proof you built up. So we definitely recommend taking the 3 minutes or so to master this skill!

Step 2: Locate the ad that's working well for you

Now you need to find the ad that's working really well for you. This is the ad that you'll use to recreate the magic with the added bonus of built-in social proof.

In Ads Manager, select the ad you want to use and click the edit button.

Under Ad Preview, locate the box icon in the right corner and click that, then scroll down to select the Facebook Post with Comments option.

You'll see that this loads up the ad that you're wanting to reuse. In our example, we chose this ad with plenty of social proof:

Step 3: Copy the post's ID

Now you need to copy the entire URL from the browser bar. We recommend copying and pasting the URL into a tool like Notepad or Sticky Notes so it's easier to manipulate the text. 

And what you're looking for from the full URL is the post ID. You'll find the post ID after the /posts/ portion of the URL. Check it out below:

So grab this number all the way up to the question mark and then copy it. You're going to use that in a later step.

Step 4: Create a new ad

Now the next step is to create a new ad just like you're used to doing for your any other Facebook ad. As usual, you'll want to choose whatever objective makes the most sense for your goals. 

Continue by choosing a new audience just like you would when building a normal Facebook ad campaign. This stuff is probably all old hat for you at this point! The real juicy stuff that you're here for is this:

Navigate to the Ads section and then click on the Use Existing Post button. This is the key!

Normally, you're probably creating a new ad and using one of the typical options like carousel, image, video, and so on... but in this case, we're going to be using an existing post.

Step 5: Enter the post ID of your awesome ad

You'll notice that there are quick ways to grab page posts that have run before, but you don't need to worry about digging through old posts to find the right one. Instead, just go ahead and click Enter Post ID to find the exact ad that you need.

Now it's all coming full circle, right? Remember that post ID you grabbed for the last step? All you have to do is paste it in the box and click Submit.

And ✨voila ✨ it appears right here. 

You can scroll down and see that the same reactions, the same comments are still there.

The beauty of this is that you can go back to the Ad Set, choose a new audience, segment, and run the ad in a totally new location...but the ad and ad creative has all of the same engagement and social proof that we had before.

Remember:

→ You need to start with creating a dark post.

→ Then find the URL of that dark post. 

→ Locate the post ID,

→ Create a new ad

→ Select Existing Post.

→ Enter your post ID

...and that's it! 

You can do this as many times as you'd like for new campaigns, for new ad sets. And, again, the real star of this trick is that you can take that social proof and carry it with you wherever you go, and whatever your audiences you want to test out.

Have you added this test to your digital advertising experiment queue? Let us know in the comments!