Since Facebook introduced Promoted Posts for business pages, many page owners have taken advantage of a way to push content to more people than would usually see your content. Still, other people have been angry, believing that Facebook was sending their posts to Cyber-Siberia and would only let them see the light of day if payment was made. The roll-out for Promoted Posts for personal pages has only confused things more.
Who Sees Your Content
Many business page owners were initially shocked to learn that their posts did not, in fact, reach 100% of the people who “liked” their page. On average, business page posts reach around 17% of your potential audience. You may be wondering why is everyone who follows you on social media not seeing your posts. Several factors come into play, such as the fact that all of your page fans don’t even log onto Facebook everyday, but the most important factor that affects views is Edgerank. Edgerank is Facebook’s method of showing users the posts they are more likely to interact with. It preselects that content based on the user’s activity and settings. For example, this tool could choose to ignore a certain friend’s game posts but see their other content.
Why have Edgerank and not show all of the posts of friends and “liked” pages? Simply because once a user gets beyond a very few friends and pages, it would be impractical to think they would scroll through page after page every day. For instance, imagine someone has a friend count of 830 with about 1,000 liked pages. This is, of course, well above average. As you might guess, this person would only see a small fraction of what is posted every day. Even someone with an average friend count of around 130 and 50 page likes will only see a portion of what everyone of their friends and brand pages post.
Promoted Posts
Promoted posts allow you to pay to beat Edgerank to a degree, and push posts out to more people who “like” your page, as well as friends of fans. The posts show up not only on the desktop, just like ads do, but, since they are in newsfeeds, they can be seen on mobile devices as well. You’ll get a little more shelf life from them, especially if your post was already doing well organically. Recently, we were able to almost double the page views on a status and get 3,000 comments by promoting a post that was already going viral for one of our clients.
Page owners are right to be concerned with the possibility of decreasing reach. There is only so much real estate in each person’s newsfeed, and competition is going to get fierce. Engaging content, liberal use of photos and videos, and posting at different times of the day can help maintain that engagement. Promoted posts can be a part of that process.
Helping you make the most of social media tools is what we do. Want to learn even more about how we can help you when it comes to marketing through social media? Contact us today!
