Add CTA buttons to your Facebook posts

Adding a call-to-action encourages more people to take action on your posts, learn how to add a call-to-action button to your Facebook posts.

​Lost the ability to tag products in your posts? Facebook has become increasingly pay-to-play and this is a clear move to encourage businesses to run ads my removing the previously free Facebook Shop features. 

Product tagging made it easy to follow a link through from a social media post to the relevant product page on your website. With that option now unavailable, what are your options? 

One way is to obviously add the product page link to your post, many of you are most likely already doing that. The problem here is that posts with links tend to get a lower reach than those without links as Facebook incentives posts that keep people engaged on the platform, as opposed to taking them off of it. You could instead add your link in the comments of your post but the jury is out on how effective this is.

One option for those with an ad account is to add a ‘Shop Now’ button to your posts. 

This can be done via the Boost button within Facebook but I would generally recommend using Ads Manager instead to give you more options, using Ads Manager also would allow you to add a call-to-action button (such as Shop Now) to multiple posts within a single ad campaign, rather than Boosting posts individually.

The trick is to pause your ad campaign as soon as you've added the button so you're not having to pay for ads but you still get the benefit of having the button on your posts.
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Steps to add a button to your posts

The below Youtube video features a walk through on how to add a CTA button via the Boost interface.

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/m9ogONvlt_Y?si=L3aMs3zPS5-04Yod

My preference is to do this via the Ads Manager interface, the key steps at the Ad Creative level are to choose 'Existing Post' rather than creating a new ad, and then selecting the 'Call-to-action' button in the screenshot below. 

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Key disclaimers
- The option to add the CTA button to your posts is not available for all post types, single images posts seem to be the best choice for doing so.

- If you're not wanting to spend any money, be sure to pause or disable your ad after clicking publish. 

- Note that you may not be able to make any additional edits to your post after adding a new CTA button to it.

- Facebook will add your page name and category to the left of the button as seen in the example on the left. It appears you're unable to change this using the above methods. The exception is when using the Boosting interface where Facebook appears to pull page name information from your website instead.

I recommend trialling this with a much older post or a brand new post so you have the option to delete and try again if you select the wrong CTA option the first time.

Sounds a bit complicated? 

That's because it's just a workaround and for pages with smaller followings, the above steps might not be worth it for any extra web traffic you might get.

If you'd like to have full control over how your posts appear you can run paid ads instead through Facebook Ads Manager, unlike organic (unpaid) posts, ads will only appear as long as you're paying for them to show but have the added benefit of reaching people not already following your page and the option to edit them at any time mid ad campaign.

If you're confused by any of the terminology above and want a better understanding of Boosting posts versus running strategic ads I'm happy to have a chat. Many business owners are deterred by poor performance from previous post Boosts or put off by the cost but it is possible to run effective Facebook Ads from just $2/day to get your business in front of more people.