Facebook gets written off as the old platform, usually by people who have not looked at who is buying. For a lot of e-commerce categories it remains the best-converting channel, with an audience that skews older, more settled and more comfortable buying from an ad.
What does not transfer is the creative. A TikTok ad cross-posted to Facebook usually underperforms, and the reasons are specific.
Four differences that change the creative
The audience is older and reads ads as ads
TikTok's audience is practised at detecting and skipping advertising, which is why native-looking UGC works there. Facebook's audience is more tolerant of something that is clearly an advertisement. Polished production is not the handicap it is on TikTok.
This does not mean stuffy. It means you can show the product plainly, state the offer, and not spend effort disguising the fact that you are selling something.
The offer carries more weight
On TikTok the hook does most of the work. On Facebook the offer does — the discount, the bundle, the guarantee, the free shipping threshold. An ordinary video with a strong offer routinely beats a brilliant video with a vague one.
Multiple placements, multiple shapes
Feed, Reels, Stories, Marketplace, right column, Audience Network. They want different aspect ratios and behave differently. Uploading one 9:16 file and letting Meta auto-place it means your feed placement is a cropped mess.
At minimum produce 9:16 for Reels and Stories, and 1:1 or 4:5 for feed. The free resizer handles the second version if you only have one.
Comments are a public negotiation
Facebook comments are long-lived, searchable within the post, and skew toward scepticism. An ad left unmoderated for a week accumulates a comment section that becomes part of the ad. Budget time for replying, or do not run at scale.
What works in the creative
Open with the problem, in text. Sound is off and the audience is scrolling. One clear line of text in the first frame outperforms a slow visual build.
Show the product early and clearly. Facebook's audience is less interested in being intrigued and more interested in understanding what is on offer.
State the offer in the video itself, not only in the caption. Many people never read the caption.
Square or 4:5 for feed. 4:5 occupies more vertical space in the feed than 1:1 and is usually the better choice where it is supported.
Captions always. Same reason as everywhere else, more so for an older audience.
Keep it 15–30 seconds. Longer than TikTok tolerates, shorter than the platform allows.
Advantage+ and what it does to testing
Meta's automated campaign types take over much of the targeting and placement decisions, and they change how creative testing works.
What it is good at: finding the audience. You can stop building detailed interest stacks; the system is better at this than you are.
What it shifts onto you: creative variety. With targeting automated, creative becomes the main lever you still control, and the system needs several distinct creatives to choose between. Feeding it one video is wasting the mechanism.
What this means practically: the volume of creative you need goes up under automation, not down. Five genuinely different videos per campaign is a reasonable floor, and "different" means different hooks and angles, not different music.
This is the structural reason generated creative fits here: the constraint is now how many distinct variants you can produce, not how well you can target. Faysell is built for producing several variants from one product rather than one polished asset, which is the shape the automated campaigns want.
The catalogue, which is underused
For e-commerce specifically, connecting a product catalogue unlocks the formats that have historically done the heavy lifting on this platform: dynamic product ads that show the specific item someone viewed, collection ads that open into a browsable set, and retargeting that references the actual product rather than the brand.
Video works inside these formats, not instead of them. A collection ad with a video cover and a product grid underneath is a strong combination that has no TikTok equivalent.
If your catalogue is not connected, that is almost certainly a higher-value afternoon than another creative test.
A reasonable starting structure
- One campaign, automated placements, with correctly sized creative for the main shapes.
- Five distinct creatives — five different angles, not five edits of one.
- A clear offer, stated in the video.
- Catalogue connected, with retargeting running separately.
- Comments checked daily for the first week.
- Judge on cost per purchase, after enough spend to be readable.
Then iterate on the angle that wins, not on the video that won.
What transfers from TikTok and what does not
Transfers: the hook discipline, captions, vertical for Reels and Stories, testing many variants.
Does not transfer: the deliberately-unpolished aesthetic, the assumption that looking like an ad is fatal, the extremely short runtime, and the single-placement mindset.
The most common mistake is treating Facebook as a secondary dumping ground for TikTok assets. For several categories it converts better, and it rewards being treated as its own channel.
The summary
Facebook's audience is older, more offer-driven and more tolerant of advertising that looks like advertising. The creative should be plainer, the offer should be louder, and the placements need their own aspect ratios.
Automated campaigns move the burden from targeting to creative volume, which means you need more distinct variants than before, not fewer. And if you sell physical products and have not connected the catalogue, do that before you make another video.