Facebook Rolls out Promoted Posts for Facebook Pages
Right in the heat of a backlash about Facebook’s disappointing IPO, Facebook is working to build its advertising potential. If you have more than 400 likes on Your Facebook Page, you now have another platform through Facebook to market your business.
Enter ‘Promoted Posts’. Facebook has been ‘Testing’ this feature for a short period of time now, with most thinking it would not see the light of day. Well, it has. Facebook quietly rolled this out yesterday with a confirmation on their marketing page. Here is a video released from Facebook on Promoted Posts – https://www.facebook.com/help/promote
So what is “Promoted Posts?”
Basically, when you post on timeline, your post is only seen by a limited number of your fans (Uhh what?). According to Facebook, promoting a post will place it in front of more of your fans. You go through to enter a post as normal and after filling out your post details you have the option to click the ‘Promote Post’ button. There you can set your desired budget for the lifetime of that post, and it will then generate an estimated reach based on your budget. Hit save, and zing, your post is launched.
Your post will have more reach but not just your own fans. Whenever someone who follows your page comments, shares, or likes your promoted post, every one of his or her friends will see the promoted post as well, which in turn, will put your business in front of more potential fans.
You can choose to promote all different types of posts which include status updates, photos, offers, questions, polls, and videos. You have three days that you can promote your post for, and for posts that you have already done, assuming they have not been there longer than three days, can be promoted as well. Facebook’s news feed shows each Facebook user the most relevant content from their friends and the pages they are connected to, which is why you can only promote posts within three days from when they are created (I had to chuckle as I was writing “relevant” content)
So, how much does it cost?
As it appears you can start off with a budget of $5. It seems it will be cost effective, yet will it have impact? or is it just Facebook rolling out a method to increase their AD Revenue on the back of the IPO flop? I believe the latter, and was probably only a matter of time, especially with General Motors pulling out all there Facebook Advertising spend of roughly $10 Million Dollars, citing Facebook Advertising as ineffective.
Can any Facebook Page get Value from this?
Assuming you have more than 400 Fans, you can at the least try. I like Facebook Offers, if used effectively (see my previous article) and using the ‘Promoted Post’ feature when you roll out an ‘Offer’, could see great benefit if you have an appealing promotion. But, doing it with a picture or status? Sure you may have more ‘reach’, but will that reach justify spend? Well, that remains to be seen.
So, what do I think?
From a personal use aspect does this lead to spam? From what I can tell, your feed won’t become a spam filled inbox of ‘Promoted Posts’. These promotions will show up for fan pages that you have already “liked” and will appear at the top of your news feed. It will be tagged as “sponsored” to show you that the owner purchased that position.
Now, follow me here for a second. The point about your fan page is to put your business in front of all your fans right? Well, this highlights that that simply does not happen. (…..?) So in saying that, how big will the reach be? As you can see from the above, Facebook gives you an “estimated reach” which based on the fact most Facebook Page Admins would have thought having a page and posting content placed it in front of all your fans. Now that this is not the case, how much can we trust the “Reach” aspect of this new feature? Honestly, I’m not sure.
Understanding Facebook is becoming increasingly difficult especially for someone with limited experience and this just seems to be adding onto that. As user experience dwindles and Facebook allows more and more methods for advertisers, I see Facebook losing some of its appeal to the casual user, which in turn could lose some of the appeal of Business.
If I was going to trial it, I would use it in conjunction with an “offer” to test the full impact, and see how much growth in fans it can provide.
Should you Trial It?
In short, yes.
It seems cheap, and could improve your reach and grow your page and fans quicker than conventional methods.
Test and Measure
What gets measured gets improved.
Trial it, measure the success. IF a positive impact, try it again, and tweak it to see how it can work best for you.
Try using Visual Impact as a way to get people to view your post. Use pictures with appeal, write content with appeal and make sure it is not irrelevant, boring or tacky. If it is, you could damage the impact of your brand socially and end up losing fans and potential, instead of gaining.
Who is winning?
Google employees would be gleefully watching all this unfold with big smiles, wondering if there time has finally come. With the Facebook IPO flop, GM announcing publicly there pull out of paid Facebook Advertising and Facebook rolling out more and more methods for its brand advertising, Google + could be getting ready to pounce. They didn’t spend all that money creating and promoting Google + for nothing, did they? They’re advertising heavily, and pushing themselves where ever they can. This could get interesting in the next 6 – 12 months.
Have any questions on this latest Facebook feature? Leave them at the bottom.
