28 Dec Making the Most of Facebook Promoted Posts

You really can’t blame Facebook for trying to milk as many different aspects of its site in its bid to make even more money. If you are one of the most hyped stocks on the face of the planet, you’d be anxious about turning your gazillions of daily traffic into cold hard cash too. Your stock price depends on it as well as the compensation packages of key talent and staff. Moreover, your stock price also impacts your attractiveness to the newest crop of the best and brightest tech workers. You need these workers to maintain your technological edge in the highly competitive social network market. Considering all the factors above, it is no surprise that Facebook has been experimenting with different ways to squeeze more revenue from its highly popular social network service. One of these methods is the promoted post.
The concept is simple. An advertiser has a post and pays Facebook money to promote the post among users and their spheres of friends and family. In essence, Facebook is renting itself out to promoting posts, which previously had to rely on their own internal quality, number of friends, and fickle nature of the facebook community in general to get viral. In the case of promoted posts, Facebook is charging to give your update a ‘push.’ This is a great idea because there are just too many variables in individual posts for companies and individual businesses alike to count on a post going viral. In fact, the vast majority of company facebook updates are duds and don’t catch on. By paying for post promotion, the company’s chances of its message getting picked up and circulated by the right people are higher. This is helped, no doubt, by Facebook’s ridiculously awesome ability to profile certain users. Remember, Facebook can target you by location, age, gender, and many other personal details.  Use the guide below to boost your promoted post’s chances of going viral.
Think outside of keyword pairing
I know, I am not writing about search engine marketing here but Facebook promotions. So why am I writing about ‘keyword pairing’? Unfortunately, that’s still how many advertising buyers feel about the promoted post feature in FB. Call it a subconscious hangover of search engine marketing or pay per click marketing. Obviously, you must not think of keyword matching. Instead focus on demographic matching. Your post should get in front of the eyeballs of the people that match the profile of your actual customers.
Think of demographic blind spots
There are many cases where advertisers thought they were targeting their demographic when their actual demographic is actually a subgroup of that larger group. As a result, they blow through lots of advertising cash and enjoy mediocre if not outright poor results. To avoid this problem, you should
run demographic diagnostics campaigns on your site. Use surveys and track IP addresses. Figure out where your buyers are coming from. Figure out their gender and their age. Figure out their other interests. The more information you have before you buy promoted posts, the lower the risk you’ll be wasting money.
Learn from your competition
Use your competition to do your homework for you. What kind of creative are they running? Try to look for patterns. Reverse engineer this by running similar ads on your own internal traffic. Are you getting good results? Tweak it a bit and see if the results improve. Once you get the right blend, buy a small promoted post campaign on FB and run a test. Keep tweaking until you get the ROI you are looking for.
Want to learn how to do Facebook Promoted Posts?  Contact me at randi@localhost or send a message to me via my Facebook Page.