[Update] Unfortunately this fix no longer works. For some reason Instagram and Facebook still don’t want promoted posts to be public.
Did you know you can finally promote your public Instagram posts? When Facebook first released the option to advertise on Instagram, it was only possible to promote a post that you create in Facebook ads manager that wouldn’t actually be displayed publicly on your Instagram page like all of your other Instagram posts!
This was to be quite honest, really annoying. You dedicate some of your budget to an Instagram advert that gets a tonne of engagement, only to realise that it doesn’t even display on your page so as soon as you turn the ad off, it’s pretty much gone for good!
Back when this was your only option, you’d have to start creating the Instagram ad in Facebook. Which is already quite counter intuitive, but if there was an option to select your Instagram posts then it would be fine. But there wasn’t, and there still isn’t. However, you can now START the creation of you adverts in Instagram by choosing to ‘promote’ your post.
When you click the promote button, you get the choice of 2 calls to action: Clicks to your website or Calls to your business. Once you’ve chosen one of those, you can select some targeting and budgets etc. You can either do this properly in Instagram from your mobile device, or you can set things up at a basic level and then move over to Facebook ads manager to edit the targeting options more thoroughly.
*Note* – If, like us, you find that the advert ends up in the wrong Facebook Ad account you can go into Power Editor and export the ad. Open the spreadsheet and delete the data in columns ‘Campaign ID,’ ‘Ad Set ID’ and ‘Ad ID.’ Save the file and import it into the correct Facebook ad account and refine your targeting and budgets as you wish. Just make sure you don’t edit anything on the ad level. As long as your ad account is linked with the Instagram page then once you upload changes in Power Editor the ad should be running.
