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.
Facebook just released new posting functionality for offers that will help businesses post deals to their Timeline for fans to redeem. Currently the functionality being released is to a limited number of Facebook Business Pages, but will eventually be available to select types of businesses. We have seen this option become available for clients with Local Business Pages and it is currently free to use. Facebook has created a help section to guide administrators and fans through the offer process, and tips for creating successful offers. Here is a preview of how to set up a Facebook Offer, and the types of options available.
To create a new Facebook Offer, Page Administrators will simply select the offer option (if available) from the post dropdown box:
Each offer contains fields for a Headline, Thumbnail Image, Number of claims, Expiration date, and Terms and Conditions:
You can also select who the target audience is for the Offer:
Once published, fans will then be able to see your Facebook Offer in their newsfeed and on the company’s Timeline. By selecting “Get Offer” a prompt will appear letting them know the offer has been sent to the email address associated with their Facebook account.
Facebook recommends tracking offers with an internal sales/redemption code, purchasing a sponsored story to promote it, making sure the staff is educated and aware of the offer details, and creating deals that have a high perceived value to encourage sharing activity.
If you have questions about Facebook Offers, or are interested in a Social Media Marketing Strategy, please call us at 800.787.0497, or email us.
Facebook’s recent enhancements to targeting options make it easier than ever to get in front of your core demographic. Suppose you are managing paid search efforts and want to target females logged into Facebook between the ages of 28-35, who are married, live in South Florida, are “Fans” of Kohl’s and Target, like the TV Show “Lost”, listen to “Dave Matthews Band”, and work at MoreVisibility. OK, so maybe that’s limiting your impressions significantly but it can be done with Facebook’s targeting options! As you are creating your ad and testing different selects, Facebook actually provides an estimated number of eyeballs that will see your ads.
Facebook estimated audience A
Facebook estimated audience B
Even better….you will be reaching a super-clean segment. Considering that consumers are using Facebook to connect with family, co-workers, and friends, there is no motive to be ambiguous when a completing profile. After all, don’t you want to be sure people find the REAL you when combing through the sea of profiles on Facebook?
For anyone out there who has not tested the waters of Facebook Ads, here is a run down of the targeting options available:
The recent enhancement that I fell in love with is “Suggested Keywords”. Suggested keywords are generated when utilizing the keyword field to target users. For example, entering “lost” into the keyword field prompts the following suggestions:
These additional suggestions are pulled from common terms that exist among Profiles who have an interest in “Lost”. Suggestions will only be provided for keywords that have established a higher volume among Facebook profiles. These keywords should be included in your ad’s targeting in order to reach additional users with a (similar) interest to your core audience. Facebook’s keyword suggestions can also be extremely valuable in uncovering keywords to include in other PPC / Paid Search efforts.
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