What are facebook Promoted Posts?
Recently, I’ve had a lot of clients ask me about promoting their business’ on social media platforms like facebook and twitter. It’s never too late to use social media to boost awareness of your brand, services or products and in fact, websites like facebook are now offering even more tools to help accomplish your marketing goals. facebook now offers ‘promoted posts’ , which allows you to reach new audiences like never before.
So what exactly is a ‘promoted post’ on facebook and how does it differ from their normal paid advertising? If you have a facebook account and use it fairly regularly, you’ve probably noticed that when you’re looking through your news feed, you now see a couple of ads between the updates. Most people were confused when they first started to see these ads, cause they had nothing to do with their friends and nothing to do with anything concerning them. However, this is where ‘promoted posts’ comes in. A ‘promoted’ post on facebook basically means you’re paying facebook to promote your post to more people than you have on your friend list (or likes for business pages) which means they’ve taken viral marketing to a whole new level. I’ve never been a big fan of pay per click (ppc) which is basically the old paid advertising facebook offered (similar to Google Adwords, you see these on the right sidebar of your facebook page).
So how does ‘promoted’ posts work and what exactly are the benefits? It’s very simple. You select a post you’ve already written on your facebook page (or write a new one for this purpose), click the ‘Boost post’ link at the bottom right corner and select a budget. The budget you select will directly affect how many people will see your post, and facebook does a good job in showing you exactly how many people will see your post. Lastly, select your payment method and you’re off! The post will be reviewed by the facebook team to ensure it meets their guidelines, and within a couple of hours, your post will start showing up on potentially thousands of new, potential customers’ news feeds.
Once the promotion is complete, you’ll see an updated status for the post on your facebook page, like this:
As you can see above, the promotion we did resulted in 4,755 people seeing our post, which is a lot more than the 150 people who ‘like’ our page (I know, it’s pretty sad that we only have 150 likes, but what are you gonna do..). This means that even if 5% of the new people who saw our post contacts us for a project, around 238 people will contact us. 238 people!
If you’ve used promoted posts on facebook before, let us know what you think and whether it was effective for you or not. To learn more about facebook promoted posts, click here.