We are all aware of the popularity of Facebook business or product pages
But how many people are actually looking at these pages? You may have generated some ‘likes’ on your page… You might have even bought ‘likes’ for your page. Now what?
You may have asked yourself – So how do I make money out of this?
Your next step is to promote posts from your page. Did you know you can hone down your audience
to specific demographics such as age, gender and interests? This can all be done very cheaply.
More than 21 million posts have been promoted since Facebook launched this new trend of advertising last year, and growth is accelerating among the small business setting, which suggests it is money well spent.
We have all seen promoted posts creeping into our news feeds… You can create one for your business too.
When creating a promoted post, what we are doing is creating a Facebook post with an ad attached to promote the post. This post is distributed through an array of people’s news feeds whether they are ‘fans’ or not. All for a very small fee.
Advantages of a promoted post over a normal Facebook ad:
– You have more space so you can use more words to say what you want
– You can have a bigger image
– It shows directly in the news feed so it looks like a normal post (let’s face it, how often do you click on the ads on the F.B. right sidebar?)
– It has a ‘like’, comment or share button which sidebar ads do not have
You will know when a post is an ad when it has ‘sponsored’ directly underneath it. A lot of people don’t realise these are adverts (they just think they are regular posts if crafted well) and then click on the ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons which spreads your word even more. If the post is exceptionally good, it could go viral.
A Facebook page is like a mini website on Facebook and does not need any fans to run a promoted post. We can type a message we want to convey, put a link to it with an image and publish the post.
When you are promoting a post, you can opt whether to promote to fans and friends of fans or through targeting options, which enables brands to post content to Facebook for its whole audience.
But you have to pay to ensure it’s seen in a specific market, or by a certain gender or age group.
A lot of people have become blind to the right-hand ads now and simply ignore them but when we show our posts in the news feed, it’s much more effective. These benefits make a promoted post a very powerful strategy.
Stay tuned for our next posts where I describe in detail the best practices and tips needed to craft a highly successful campaign.