Short answer: No. OK, OK, things are never that easy. So I’ll answer with a wishy-washy “sometimes”.
With all the new Facebook advertising options out there how do you choose? Do you go with a Sponsored Story, a regular Facebook Ad, Facebook Offers, Checkin Deals? Or do you just move to a small island that hasn’t heard of Facebook? Sometimes that option sounds good.
Well watch my video where I go through all the ins and outs of Facebook Promoted Posts including:
- How to create a Promoted Post
- When to use a Facebook Promoted Post
- Where to find the stats for your Facebook Promoted Posts
If you want to know more about improving your Facebook Ad results, take a look at this article Andrea wrote: 6 Tips to Improve Your Facebook Ad Results.
Here’s were I think Facebook Promoted Posts do fit into your marketing mix:
1. To help increase engagement with existing fans. Promote fun posts and sometimes sales posts.
2. To reach mobile users. Facebook sponsored stories and traditional ads don’t appear on Mobile devices.
3. To reach people who may tune out Facebook ads on the side.
As I cover in the video, I ran two Promoted Posts. One from a post that was more “salesy” talking about coaching rates increasing shown below:
And one more “fun” post with a quote that was easy to interact with shown here:
So I’m kind of cheating and showing you the results before this promoted post is done running. But I think that the stats show that the Quote promoted post is performing much better than the other one before it is even done running. Promoted Posts are good to get in front of people who haven’t seen your posts in awhile in the News Feed. And I think it works better if your post is more fun and engaging.
Take a look at the stats from each.
Coaching Post:
Quote Post:
You can see from the stats that even though the Quote post has only had $6.16 spend so far, it has almost as many clicks as the Coaching post. So it has more interaction which will then help your Edgerank.
The answer to whether Promoted Posts are worth lies in your objective. If you are looking to reach your current fans through the News Feed that you may not be reaching, a Promoted Post every once in awhile might be worth it.
What do you think? Have you run a Promoted Post and gotten good results? Bad results? Tell me in the comments!
I’ve long wondered: if you pay to promote content, are you getting access to better sets of rules than what a standard post gets?
Must you promote to be effective?
The addition of a “promoted” badge on Tweets diminishes the value of the Twitter stream they’re placed in. If the point is to connect to the audience who hasn’t seen your stuff (and therefore – is probably not your core audience) – do you really care as a business owner? Should you care? Maybe… if that view turns into a sale, but we have to see data to back that up.
It’s not enough to just say, “We can do this to increase our stats for people who don’t ordinarily see our stuff” – we have to have ROI.
Loved the video! Andrea is a scream!!
Loved the video – Andrea is a scream! There was a lot of good content too. Highly recommended viewing.
Thanks! 🙂
Andrea, thanks for another easy-to-understand, timely, and entertaining post. However, the Promote button does not show on my page anywhere – not on new posts or old ones. There is nothing about this on the Facebook help section or in any other articles on this subject, such as the one Mashable wrote over a week ago. I have never done advertising but you’d like Facebook would want to encourage me to start!
Great point Nick! I don’t think that the people who have stopped responding aren’t your core audience – I think they just may be lurkers or not very responsive on Facebook.
I agree that ROI is a big concern but some marketing can’t be effectively measured. Just because you can’t measure every step of the journey doesn’t mean that it isn’t valuable. But you have to measure as much as you can.
I’ve tried promoting a post 3 times so far. I’ve reached a few hundred more Fans each time – which I consider to be a only a slight benefit. I got the most encouraging result when I promoted a new item for sale. I had 6 in stock and 4 of them sold during the time the promotion ran. My plan is to use promotions sparingly in much the same way Andrea recommends.
So sorry I missed this comment Claire! Promoted Posts are only available in the US (I think they are slowly rolling these out to other countries) and only if your page has more than 400 Likes. If you are in both of these categories then you may just not see it yet – sometimes they roll these things out more slowly. Hope that helps!
Loved this informative vid on the use of Facebook promoted ads. Thank you! I’m going to try it for comparison purposes and go from there. A latte does sound a whole lot more enticing though. 🙂
I am experimenting with promoting a post and although nearly all my current “likes” are from the US, 70% of my reach on my promoted posts are from Aregentina….what gives?
I have about 1500 fans for an ecomm site. My posts are normally seen by 400-600 people and a I get about 1% -2% of them interacting view the picture, liking the post, or liking the page. For $20 I get 7k-10k reach and I get no more than 1% interaction. 100 people interacting with a sale post, 15 link clicks. My cost per interaction is WAY too high when you compare to other CPM banner ads.
Definitely does not sound worth it!
Seems like promoted posts are beneficial for brand awareness rather than sales. This is a great video. Thanks!
it is defiantly not worth it.
We are an online based advertisements company we own alot of pages on Facebook, fans in total are 400K we started them up all only 2 months ago, they’re are all active , If you’d like to advertise your products, websites, or facebook pages we will be happy to, and if you’d like to see our pages insights we are more than happy to show you.
for more details:
our email address is: fb.ads.co@gmail.com.
Cheers, Jarrad . Advertiser of Facebook Advertisements Company 2012.
You can can get better CTR and ROI if you use your promoted posts in conjunction with feed targeting option (gender, age, location…)
Thanks for your feedback on that! I haven’t tried that yet but was interested in the results.