When it comes to crafting a great Facebook post for paid promotion, you can sometimes get overwhelmed by the details.
Who should you target, exactly? Is the image right for the post? Will the title inspire people to click (or is it just plain boring)?
It's not easy to put together a really good Facebook post, and it's even harder to make it next-level great.
In this post, I've collected six tips that you can apply to your post creation and promotion process to maximize performance.
1. Choose appropriate targeting
Why do you want to boost your post? Do you want to engage with your current readers or acquire new ones? For both goals, there are dedicated targeting methods you can apply.
Retargeting existing visitors
Retargeting is a great way to re-engage with your one-time visitors and keep them coming back to your website. Targeting your website visitors can be very effective - these are, after all, the people who are visiting your website and reading your articles already.
According to research, your website visitors are 70% more likely to convert as a result of retargeting.
Once you've set up retargeting (through the use of a Facebook website pixel), you can also segment your targeted audience according to pages they visited, making sure that you promote articles they more likely respond to.
Lookalike audiences
If your goal is to target people who haven't been in touch with you, then a 'Lookalike Audience' could be a great option. Lookalike audiences enable you to target Facebook users who are similar to your follower base - or even to your competitor's follower base. If you have an engaged audience, then finding more people of similar interests and traits is likely to help drive higher quality traffic to your website.
2. Make your post image look great
Sometimes it can be hard to find an appropriate image for your post. But image selection can be crucial, particularly when you consider that 90% of information that comes to the brain is visual, and we process image-based information 60,000 times faster than text.
So what are the most appropriate image types for Facebook posts?
- Photos - relevant, everyday photos of products
- Charts - a simple informative chart is a pretty good teaser
- Visual representations - for explaining complex things in a simple way
- Comics - funny pictures can have a great impact, but make sure that the selected comic is not offensive
Even if you don't have Photoshop skills, you can create awesome visuals by using drag and drop visual tools like Canva or Piktochart.
And while it's better to create and use your own images over boring stock photos, but if you don't have the capacity to take your own pictures for your campaigns, you can still use high-quality free stock photos that look great.
3. Craft an irresistible title
A successful sponsored post campaign starts with a great title.
A clickable title triggers emotion and creates a curiosity gap which inspires people to want to discover what's behind that post. Here's a list of 180 power words for writing emotional headlines.
Once you have different headline variations, you can test them by using a title analyser. The higher its score is, the more clickable and optimized your headline will be.
4. Use the message section as a teaser
The message of your post intends to support your title and works like a teaser.
Try to keep it short and sweet.
To catch readers' attention and get more engagement, you could also start experimenting with the following:
- Asking questions (research shows questions can generate up to 23% more engagement)
- Tagging related pages to reach a broader audience
- Using emojis
5. Timing is more important than you think
When should you start promoting a post?
You can use Facebook's built-in tool under the Insights menu to get a good estimate about the activity of your follower base.
The chart shows the most and least active periods of your audience - but that's still not necessarily enough to select the perfect time to promote your post.
Recency is one of the critical factors in Facebook's News Feed algorithm. If a significant amount of people engage with a certain post within a short period of time, then it'll rank better in the News Feed, reaching even more people through higher engagement.
The key is to monitor your content performance in real-time and act as soon as shares and engagement surge. This is the perfect time to put some money behind that post.
Your campaign demands flexibility. Don't just hit promote on a random article; be agile and iterate fast.
6. Experimentation leads to excellence
We always have countless assumptions regarding our paid promotion campaigns and we develop a sense of what will and won't work. But feelings, assumptions and best practices aren't always enough - we need to prove or disprove them with data to decide what works.
Testing is the only way to optimize your social campaigns - here's what you should do:
- Create a list with the assumptions you would like to test
- Determine the expected benefits/results and work needed for implementation
- Aim for the low-hanging fruit