What Facebook Ad Tools can I use in Sprout?

New to Sprout Social? Learn all about our paid social tools here.

Sprout offers easy access to Facebook and Instagram Boosting for both Published and Unpublished (aka Dark) Posts. Both help businesses looking to amplify their content across Facebook and Instagram. Additionally, you can also view and reply to any Facebook and Instagram ad comments in the Smart Inbox.

Facebook and/or Instagram Boost

Facebook and Instagram Boost is available within Compose if a Facebook Ad Account is connected to a Group. It's also available in the Publishing calendar and the Post Performance Report (for Facebook only) if you'd like to promote a post after it's been published. You may want to consider performance metrics like clicks, engagement and likes when you are evaluating which posts to boost.

Boosted or Promoted Posts will be shown to a larger audience across Facebook and Instagram, expanding reach, visibility​ and overall engagement.

Unpublished Posts

Creating Unpublished Page Posts

When composing a post, click  > Facebook. You'll see the option to send an Unpublished Post.

Unpublished or 'Dark' Facebook posts are created by businesses specifically for advertising purposes. These posts don't appear on a page’s Timeline or in fans’ News Feeds, but they can be promoted as advertisements using the ad console within your Facebook page in Ads Manager > Power Editor. 

After creating an Unpublished post within Sprout Social, use the Facebook Power Editor to create an ad with target-detailed demographic information to ensure it's seen by that specific audience segment and not distributed to every Company Page fan. 

Ad comments

You can view Facebook and Instagram Ad comments in the Smart Inbox in real-time. To view these comments, ensure that your Facebook Ad Account and Facebook Pages running your ads are connected to Sprout. These ad comments won't appear in Sprout if no comments are made on the ad posts.

Facebook & Instagram Ad comment FAQs

For a single ad, sometimes the ads are grouped under two or more instances of the same ad post. Is this expected? 

Yes. Sometimes a group of ad comments come into Sprout under a given ad post, and another group of ad comments come into Sprout under a different ad post, even though they look the same. 

When viewing the Ad Post in the Reply Layer or Smart Inbox there's no image, just the text. Is this expected?

Yes. Sometimes Sprout won't get the image on the ad post. 

The ad isn't showing up in the Post Performance report. Is this expected?

If the ad has no comments it will not show up in the report. 

I see the ad post in the Post Performance Report, but it has no metrics. Is this expected?

Yes, due to an API limitation.

Will these ad comments show up in the internal reports?

Yes, they appear in the Engagement Report and Inbox Team Report.

Do I need to re-auth any ad accounts or Pages to get access?

No.

Do I need to have the Ad Account and the Page connected to Sprout?

Yes.

Should I expect a delay for Facebook and Instagram Ad comments? 

No.

If Facebook or Sprout has an outage, will I get the comments that were created during the outage?

No.

I published an ad and it's live but I don't see the ad post in the Inbox

You only see ad posts in the Inbox when at least one comment has been made on the ad.

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