A popular and powerful type of Facebook advertising is the promoted post. This is one of the easiest ways to promote your business’ Facebook page.
What is a Promoted Post?
Promoted posts are a form of Facebook advertising that allow you to pay for additional exposure of the posts you create on your Facebook page’s wall. Another term for this is “Boosting your post.” I’ll use boosting your post and promoted posts interchangeably.
Promoted posts can be displayed in Facebook’s right sidebar and within the newsfeed itself for desktop and mobile users.
Have you noticed posts in your newsfeed that say “Sponsored“? This gives you an idea as to how your ad will look to others.
If you’re confused about the difference between organic and paid reach, read the definitions below:
- Organic reach: The number of unique people who saw your post in News Feed or on your Page. This is the number of people that you DIDN’T pay to reach. They’re a subset of the people who like your page or their friends.
- Paid reach: The number of unique people who saw your post through an ad. They can still be people who like your page and their friends, but they’re people who wouldn’t have seen your post if you didn’t promote it.
While the average Facebook wall post will only reach a small percentage of your fans, a promoted post has the ability to reach more of your fans, their friends, and people that you specify in your ad settings (based on demographics and interest). In short, it’s the best way to ensure your most important messages reach your target audience.
Why You Need to Promote Your Post
In 2012, Facebook revealed that most posts on a business’s Facebook page wall only reach 16% of the page’s fans (Source: Facebook). Since August 2013, pages have reported reaching MUCH less than 16% of their fans due to an algorithm change by Facebook. Considering the time and investment you’ve made into building fans for your page, you certainly want more than 16% of them to see your updates.
Types of Facebook Posts to Promote
So what types of posts can—and should—you promote using Facebook Promoted Posts advertising?
Since you are investing advertising capital into your post, make sure it is a post that helps you achieve your Facebook marketing goals, whether they are to increase your fan base, increase your engagement, encourage clicks to your website, build your mailing list or convert to leads or sales.
With these goals in mind, here are some ideas of worthy promoted posts:
- A post that advertises lead magnets for your mailing list
- A post with a discount for new customers
- A post with a strong call-to-action
- A post with an eye-catching image
- A post with a sense of urgency
- A post with a video
- A post that links to a blog post on your website (you can ask for leads/sales in the blog post)
You can also promote plain text posts that are meant to strictly drive engagement. Just make sure you have a goal in mind for your promotion so you are spending your advertising budget wisely.
Get inspiration for your promoted post by visiting your competitors’ Facebook pages, and looking at the posts that have gotten the most engagement. These are likely the ones that they have promoted using Facebook advertising.
Even if they didn’t promote them, finding the ones with the most engagement will show you what types of posts will be well received by your target audience.
You can also like your competitors’ Facebook pages to see their sponsored posts in your newsfeed. This can help you stay wise to their latest promotions and offers so you can create similar ones for your business.
Formatting Tips
So what are some important things you should consider when formatting a post on your Facebook page?
1. Make sure the image is no more than 20% text
While Facebook removed the rule for the amount of text in your Facebook page cover photo, they did not remove it when it comes to images in your Facebook ads, including Promoted Posts.
Facebook will not approve your promoted post if any image within it has more than 20% text.
If you are planning to promote a post on your wall that links back to a page on your website, you can either upload your own photo as the image or choose one that’s embedded on the site.
2. Make sure you include a call-to-action
Don’t assume that if you include a link that people will click it. Tell them to click it.
3. Use Facebook’s new Call-To-Action buttons on your posts
Testing shows Facebook’s new CTA buttons decrease cost-per-click by 22 cents. Use them!
4. Add UTM parameters to your URL
Do you use Google Analytics? If so, make sure you take advantage of UTM parameters to track your Promoted Post clicks. Simply paste in your destination URL in Google’s handy URL Builder. Then take the full URL and shorten it with your favorite URL shortener (such as Bit.ly) so you don’t have an unwieldy URL.
