Get More Out of Your Facebook Updates with Promoted Posts

Last week, I wrote that content is an essential part of any social media strategy in order to prove value. But anyone who has used a social network knows that a tweet or a status update doesn’t have a long lifespan... no matter how much content you share. In fact, most of the links you share only have visibility for about 3 hours before they are lost in the noise; not much time for the effort. But earlier this year, Facebook solved that problem for business pages by launching promoted posts.

What are Promoted Posts for Pages?

Promoted Posts allow you to increase a page post’s visibility by giving it premium placement in a targeted user’s news feed. With a small budget, you can easily extend the life of a Facebook post, long past the initial publish time.

There are two ways to utilize Promoted Posts: using the traditional Facebook Ads Manager or by selecting “Promote” at the bottom of a post on your business page. The difference between those two styles of Promote Posts is that Facebook’s traditional Ad Manager allows you to implement advanced targeting. (And really, the only reason to advertise on Facebook is to take advantage of its targeting.) 

What Should You Promote?

When using Promoted Posts, you’re not doing it to get more Likes or comments on the post. Like everything you do on Facebook, you should have both long-term community building and lead generation in mind. So you should use promoted posts on:

• Lead-Generating Content: Sharing an occasional link to a landing page with a helpful download is a best practice for any Facebook strategy. So when you share a landing page, hop over to Facebook’s Ad Manager and promote that landing page post to a targeted audience that would be interested in your content.
• Your Most Popular Content: Even popular content can have a short lifespan. If there’s a photograph or blog post that received a lot of Likes, comments and shares, push it out to more people who may have missed it when you originally published the post.

Who Should You Target?

When you are promoting a post, you need to have the right audience. Depending on the content you share, your audience for Promoted Posts can include:

• Fans: Not every fan sees a post when you hit publish. If you want to make sure that your fans download your new content or read a popular blog, you can promote your post to people who currently Like your page. This gives you the opportunity to engage with your community and potentially turn fans who haven’t converted on your website into leads.
• Friends of Fans: Social influence is a powerful thing, especially when it comes to Facebook ads. Targeting friends of fans means your post will include a friend’s name on the Promoted Post like a Sponsored Story. Combine that with Facebook targeting, and your content can engage users who haven’t Liked your page but will be interested in your post.
• Potential Fans: Even if someone isn’t connected to your business’s page by any measurable degree, you can still use Facebook targeting to promote a post to a specific group of likely fans. If you combine this targeting with a post that includes a landing page, you can gain a new lead instead of just another page Like.

The best part about all these options is, when your content is good enough, the Promoted Posts work. Just take a look at this graph from Bitly showing a link’s lifespan when launching a Promoted Post about four days after the initial publish date.

Have you tried promoting posts with Facebook’s Ads Manager yet? How has it worked for you?