Earlier this year, Facebook started showing Facebook Page admins how many fans view each post; the average Page content is seen by only 16% of fans. Now you can use Facebook promoted posts so that a higher percentage of your fans see the post you choose to promote, as well as a higher percentage of the friends of fans who interact with your post. In this blog post, we’ll cover the basics of how to set up and execute your promoted posts.
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What You Need to Know
- Facebook Promoted Posts are only available to Pages with between 400 and 100,000 Likes.
- You can only promote a Facebook post within 3 days of the date it was created.
- Your promoted post will only be promoted for 3 days from the date it was created. This means a 2 day old post has 1 day left in its promotion. You may pause and resume your promoted post at any time within the 3 day window.
- You can promote any kind of post. This includes Facebook offers, images, videos, text updates and questions.
How to Promote a Post
Create your status update as you normally would, and then click on Promote.
From here, you will see fixed dollar amounts ranging from $5, $10, $15 or more, depending on the number of Fans you have. For each dollar amount, you will also see an estimated reach. This is Facebook’s estimate on how many people will see your promoted post, based on the amount of budget you select.
Once you’ve promoted your post, you’ll see the notation Promoted for $X, as seen above. Clicking on this will bring up information (below) about your current reach and budget spent. Opening the gear drop-down at the bottom gives you the option to ‘Stop Promotion’.
To check how your promoted post is performing, hover over the X% of people reached, and you’ll see more data on the total % of people that you reached through your promotion.
The Benefits of Promoted Posts
- Promoted Posts are shown in desktop and mobile news feeds of users. This is a benefit because Facebook users tend to interact more with content in their news feed over advertisements, and, even more importantly, promoted posts let you reach Facebook users on their mobile phones. At this time, mobile users don’t see any ads, so the ability to promote your way into their mobile news feed cannot be understated.
- Due to Edgerank, if you have a large percentage of fans who have never interacted with your content, the number of people your content reaches over time will likely dwindle. Promoted Posts gives you the chance to re-engage these users, who otherwise may have never had the chance to see your content again.
Ready to start promoting your content on Facebook?
Consider promoting the types of posts that generally perform well for your Page and deliver value to your company. Use your Insights data to pin down what your most successful content is, and promote away!
Have you used promoted posts for your Page? Do you have any questions about best practices? Let us know in the comments below!
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About Mary Chevalier
Mary is Co-Founder of SalesBlend and works closely with clients to help them use digital marketing to achieve measurable business results. Follow Mary on Twitter @MaryVChevalier.