We tried out Facebook’s new promoted page posts feature and were quite pleased with the results. We had seen previously that only about 20% of our fans see our San Diego Biotechnology Network Facebook page posts (part one of figure below, 300 of 1800 fans saw an unpromoted post). We spent $5 to promote the post shown in the middle of the figure below—and note that for now you must post from the Facebook web application, promoting does not work for automatic posts. We were happy to see that we got four times the impressions and four ‘likes.’ For this page, we consider 1-2 likes good for a post, so these results were great.
We know that Facebook uses ‘likes’ to decide how often to show a post, and while you obviously can’t buy these, we think the promoted posts could increase views and engagement. We were initially concerned that our page fans might be irritated by a promoted post, but this wasn’t the case, and you can see how the post looks to them at the bottom of the figure. Of course, choose promoted content carefully and see what works with your fans.
In short, Facebook promoted page posts are worth a try, go for it and let us know how it goes!
