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.
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.)
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:
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:
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?
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