How do I keep likes and comments on my Facebook ads?
Likes, comments and shares belong to the underlying post, not to the ad, so the way to keep them is to create new ads from the existing post rather than uploading the creative again. In Ads Manager choose Use Existing Post and pick the post; through the API this is the object story ID. Any fresh upload of the same file, even a byte identical one, starts at zero engagement.
Last updated 2026-08-26
Why engagement disappears when you relaunch
An ad is a pointer to a piece of creative plus its settings. When you upload the same video into a new ad, Meta creates a new post behind it, and that new post has no history. The old post keeps the 400 comments, and the new ad shows none. This is why a scaled winner sometimes underperforms its original: the creative is identical, the settings are identical, and the missing social proof is the whole difference. It is the most common avoidable loss in scaling.
Using an existing post in Ads Manager
In the ad level of the creation flow, switch from uploading media to Use Existing Post, then select the post from the page's published or ads posts. If the post was created as an ad, it lives under ads posts rather than the page timeline, which is where people usually fail to find it. From there the new ad references the same post, so all its engagement shows in every placement the new ad runs in.
Finding the post ID
In Ads Manager, open the ad's preview and use the option to view the post permalink, or read the ID from the URL. Through the Marketing API the field on an existing ad's creative is object story ID, formatted as pageid underscore postid. Worth knowing: an ad's effective object story ID is the one you want when the ad was created from an upload, because the plain field can be empty in that case. Tools that offer post ID scaling read the effective field for exactly this reason.
When not to reuse the post
The comment thread travels with the post. If a creative has attracted a thread of complaints, an unanswered support question or an off topic argument, every new ad inherits it. Reusing is also wrong when you want a clean read on a revised creative, because the accumulated engagement biases early performance and you cannot tell whether the edit helped. And a post reused across radically different audiences carries comments written by a different audience, which can read strangely.
Housekeeping that keeps proof compounding
Reply to comments on your ad posts, since an answered question converts where an ignored one does not. Hide rather than delete spam so the commenter does not know and does not escalate. And keep a short list of your proven post IDs somewhere your team can find them, because the single biggest reason people upload fresh instead of reusing is that finding the old post takes longer than dragging in the file.
Post ID reuse ties several ads to one post, so pausing or deleting that post affects all of them. Keep the source post live for as long as any ad references it.