If you’re the manager of your company’s Facebook Page, then you’ve probably noticed some significant changes over the past few months to how your posts are shared with your audience. Love it or hate it, Facebook has been, and will continue to be, a moving target for marketers, and one that we need to constantly stay on top of to maintain relevancy.
If you’re concerned about the reach of your posts, or are just ready to develop a targeted social media marketing strategy to reach your target audience, you’ll want to consider putting a budget toward two areas of Facebook’s tools: Ads and Promoted Posts.
To get you started, here are some of the key differences and potential opportunities for each. If you need some support in ramping up your social media advertising and marketing programs, please reach out to us for help.
Facebook Ads:
- Key Difference: Can be used to reach anyone with a personal Facebook profile by identifying target information such as: age, gender, marital status, activities & interests, family status, location, language, and thousands of specific ‘likes’.
- Budget: It’s up to you. Set a maximum for the lifetime of a specific period, a maximum daily limit, and/or a cost-per-click or per-impression. Our clients have had budgets range from $100 maximum to several thousand dollars per month limits.
- Best Used For: Reaching new target prospects and getting them to Take Action on your page by ‘liking’ (subscribing to your page), sharing with friends, or clicking through to an identified landing page for advanced conversions or more information.
Facebook Promoted Posts:
- Key Difference: Used to leverage your existing audience (those who ‘like’ your page) and encourage them to take action. Please note: your Facebook page must have a minimum of 400 fans to participate in the Promoted Posts program. If you’re not there yet, you may wish to use Facebook Ads to help you reach that initial minimum audience level.
- Budget: As with Ads, the budget is up to you, but tends to run significantly lower than Ad budgets.
- Best Used For:Maximizing the reach of important information to your existing audience. For instance, if you’re promoting an incentive or VIP program, launching a new product/service, or want to be sure that your audience knows about your exciting recent news or award nomination, then this is the ideal tool.
- Caution: We hope this is an issue that will be flushed out over time, but the option on Promoted Posts to target ‘people who like our page, and their friends’ has cast far too wide of a net for our comfort level. On client tests, and in researching the experiences of others, we’ve found that this option seems to deliver a higher rate of spam to the page. We recommend targeting only ‘people who like this page’ and giving them a REASON to like, share, or comment on the post in order to promote it to their friends directly.
As with all Facebook marketing and advertising campaigns, you will generally find the best results when providing your audience with unique, fun, interesting, easy-to-consume, and easy-to-share content. Visuals tend to perform better than most text-based content, so take some time to find or design images for those posts and Promoted Posts that will have an impact. Ask people to share, like, or comment; and be sure to measure the results with Facebook Insights reporting.
Congratulations on building your Facebook marketing and advertising program! If you need any help or have questions, we’d love to chat with you.
