Facebook Promotional Posts: A Case Study

 
 

 

By Janette Speyer and Alison Brown, Web Success Team

Facebook recently introduced the option to “promote” certain posts on Facebook pages to ensure that more people see your update over the course of several days. To qualify, your page must have at least 400 likes and you can choose to promote your post to either just the people who like your page, or the people who like your page plus their friends. There is a fee involved — $5 to $75 depending on the amount of people you want it to reach. Last week, the Web Success Team decided to trial the promotional option to see how effective it was in fostering engagement — below is what we found.

The Potential

When Facebook initially rolled out the post promotions, you could only promote to your fans and the maximum amount you could spend was $10 over a three-day period. Currently, based on the Web Success Team page, for $5 your average visibility will be at least several hundred and for $75, your visibility can reach up to 27,000. While these amounts are scaled depending how many people like your page already, if your company has several hundred thousand fans already, then your reach threshold will be substantially higher.

The Test

From Monday Aug 20 to Thursday Aug 23 we spent $15 on promoting a post regarding our eBook, which discusses why you should market your brand on Pinterest. Our primary goal was to reach 2K-3K people who liked our page plus their friends. The post focused on asking people to like the page, which would give us increased engagement, likes and visibility, while they received free online marketing advice about marketing your brand on Pinterest.

The Results

For increased engagement and likes, our promoted post definitely worked. However, since the Web Success Team is a B2B company, we believe the results would be more profound if we were a B2C company. Nonetheless, our results are still worth sharing. Over the course of our three-day trial, we found that we had quadruple the amount of engagement. In summary we had 41 page views, 32 link clicks and 29 post likes (versus 8 on a good day). Additionally, we gained 21 fans and 20 people went through the entire process and downloaded the eBook from our website.

The Conclusion

If we were to run the post promotion with a budget of $15 per week for 2-3 months, we concluded that there is a lot of potential to boost your brand’s online image and get more page likes.

The amount of “likes” is always an issue for any business page and by doing promotional posts you are able to provide organic engagement — so people are more likely to stay a fan and continue to engage with you. Another great feature of the promotional posts is the option to do a split-test to see what works better — sponsored page post advertisements or sponsored posts. You can also experiment with promoting different posts to see how your fans react to each one. Do they respond more to funny, inspirational, or newsworthy posts?

At the end of the day Facebook pages are for promoting your brand and engaging with customers. So, since it doesn’t cost very much, go ahead and start promoting your posts — then let us know what you find out!

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