4 Steps for Promoting Posts in Facebook

Facebook Promoted Posts are now available with all company’s Facebook Pages.  Promoted Posts are a marketing tool that can target more of your fan audience.  Users that have liked your Facebook Page will not always see your status updates in their newsfeed.  Facebook uses a scoring system, called Edge Rank, which evaluates the activity, time, and weight of each post.   This score determines the percentage of your friends who are potentially exposed to your content.  The Promoted posts offer an opportunity to bypass this scoring system, by paying a nominal fee to increase the percentage of fans seeing each individual post.   Below are the steps to successfully create a Promoted Post.

Step 1: Use a Post with engaging content. You may want to promote posts for contest announcements, really engaging updates, posts that include photos or videos,  and any post content that already attracts activity on your Faceboook Page like consumer polls, quizzes, or questions.

Step 2: Post the status update. You will be able to promote a status update post for up to three days after posting it.  Facebook deems a post older than three days no longer relevant so, it will only offer to promote any one post for up to three days.  This three day window can give you time to evaluate post relevancy.  You can use the quick stats, available at the bottom of each post, to track activity.  You may elect to pay to promote and expand it’s reach due to the posts popularity.

Step 3: Select the amount to spend. You can promote a post by clicking the arrow next on the lower right of the post container.   There are two options, setting a budget of $5.00 to $10.00 per post, depending on the estimated reach you want to target over the duration of three days.

Step 4: Monitor promotions, pause in-active campaigns. Once you select “save”, you will be able to pause your campaign from the same drop down box.  You will also see a status board with your promotional end date and the amount of fans reached with your selected budget.  This feature will allow you to stop a promotion before the entire budget is used, if you determine the activity has expired on that post.

Using these steps, you can successfully promote important updates to your company’s Facebook Page.  This is an important tool to leverage, since the target audience has already indicated their interest in your business.  Overall success with this tool will be a combination of creating engaging posts and monitoring activity once promoted.  You may consider an advertising strategy using Facebook’s sponsored stories to build a larger fan base first.   The same recommendations for creating content and monitoring will apply to those as well.