What are Facebook Promoted Posts?
If your business's Facebook Page has more than 400 likes, you have the option to try a Facebook advertising feature called "Promoted Posts." The button, which you'll find at the bottom of the status update box, lets you select a budget and will show you an estimated reach of that post. Promoted posts appear in the news feeds of the people who like your page, and in the news feeds of friends of the people who have interacted with your post.
The Experiment
The experiment is simply to test if promoted posts generate more reach, engagement activity, and traffic to Optify's site and to see if spending more gets you more bang for your buck. I promoted three posts with $10/$20/$30 budgets. Each post had very similar content and call to action.
The Hypothesis
The more you spend promoting your post, the more impressions on the post, which will lead to increased engagement on the post, which will translate to more traffic generates back to your site, which ideally will end up in lead conversions.
The Promoted Post Examples
To capture a benchmark for the experiment, I created one post similar to the ones that were going to be promoted to collect typical organic reach, engagement and traffic data. Then I kicked off promotions for the three test experiments during the following 10 days.
Organic Post - The Green Internet Group case study
Promoted Post for $10 - ALM case study
Promoted Post for $20 - ADSI case study
Promoted Post for $30 - Pathable case study
Results
- Promotion kicks off after organic reach - After the first promoted post, I obsessively kept checking up on the "People Reached" stats to see if there were going to be a huge spike in traffic to the page that was included in the post. Disappointingly the huge spike never came, but I did notice there was always organic reach data before paid reach.
- Impressions don't mean the post has actually been viewed - For each post, the percentage of people who like our page that 'saw' our post doesn't necessarily mean they saw our post. Our post was highlighted in their timeline but they could have logged into their account and immediately gone to their personal timeline, check their latest Farmville stats, or searched their latest crush.
- Promoted Post Estimated Reach over delivers - When you set your budget Facebook tells you the estimated reach at that budget amount. In all cases the paid reach was far greater than the estimated reach.
Conclusion
So what do I think about promoted posts? Right now, they're still proving enough value to keep allocating budget to that channel. Promoted posts help double the impressions for each post. They also generate more likes to the page in addition to the individual post which will help with the organic reach for the next post that is published. Most importantly, Facebook as a referring source does generate leads, opps, and even closed deals for Optify. Here are some questions you should have answers to before you start experimenting with Facebook promoted posts.
- What are your goals?
- What are you promoting?
- How are you measuring success?
I would love to hear if you 'like' promoted posts or if it's something you're looking to try out soon.