Should you promote a post?

So we have all moved on and have accepted that Facebook is now only going to show your fanpage status updates to a small portion of your fans. Sure it sucks but thats the way it is and it seems most of us have moved on. However the question now comes to mind: Should we promote our posts to give them that artificial edge rank and make sure people see it? The answer is simple. It depends:
Below we will take a look at the two ways you can promote your status update and well have a look at how those promotion options measure up to other forms of Facebook marketing.
1) Promote the post to your followers and there friends:
So this seems simple. You have a message you just need to get to your followers, perhaps its a special on your product or service. Perhaps is a announcement you want all your customers to know about. Whatever it is you need to get it to as many of your existing fan base as you can. So you think to your self why not promote the post. Well lets see how good if an idea this is.


This is a screenshot of us clicking to promote a post on the First Social Apps Facebook page. While the price will vary depending on the number of fans in general the scale will be the same. As you can see in the image it will cost us $50 to promote our post to a maximum of 12,000 people. Thats a CPM (cost per thousand) of $4.16
However you could also simply run a normal Facebook ad and target people connected to you and there friends. Doing this will give you a MUCH lower CPM of around $0.40.So in this scenario it is approximately 10x more costly to promote the post directly from the ‘boost post’ option in your fan page than it is to just create an advert.
So does this mean that you should always create an advert when you want to promote a post? Well not nessisarly. Using the boost post is much more costly however it is quicker. Also a promoted post will show in your fans news feed instead of being an ad in the right side of there screen so its likely to get you a more immediate result. So to sum up, if you have a message or announcement that you want to make to your fans and it absoultly MUST get in front of them as quickly as possible then the ‘boost post’ is an expensive but effective option. However if your making an announcement about something that is going to happen a week from now or two weeks or longer than your generally much better off creating an advert.

2) Ok the second way to promote a post. Besides promoting a post to your fans you also no have the option to promote the post to ‘everyone on Facebook’. So you see this option and your thinking .. ‘cool I can promote my post to everyone on Facebook ‘ , well this might be exactly what makes it a bad idea.


In this example Facebook is giving us the option to promote our post to everyone on Facebook for $300 with an estimated reach of 160,000. Thats a CPM of $1.87 which is much better than promoting to our friends. However you should take note of one major thing. The only targeting option we have is location. We cant target by age, by interest, by anything. So basically literately everyone will see this post. Most of who will have NO interest in what we do. In essence this is an un targeted option. Something that is often a waste. Sure 160,000 people will see your post, but if only 20% are even remotely interested in what your doing that makes your effective CPM 5X higher.



Facebook advertising has in general a lower CTR (click through rate) than other forms of advertising. However because Facebook has such a massive amount of personal information about its users an advertiser can laser target an ad to make sure only people likely to be interested in your product will see it. When you promote a post ‘to everyone on Facebook’ you are removing the single best aspect of Facebook advertising. Because if this I cant recommend that you promote a post to everyone.
So to sum up:
Promoting a post to your fans and there friends: expensive but effective, probably only a good idea if you must get a message out quick though, other than that just run an ad and enjoy a much lower CPM.
Promoting a post to everyone on Facebook: Not really a good idea since you cant laser target you audience. Many of the people who see your ad will have no interested in your product or service. Your effective CPM will be much higher than what it looks like. Unless you have a very general fan page or something that people of all ages, life styles, education levels, and personality’s will be interested in (which most dont) its probably best to just avoid this option.

Till next time,
Brett Rutecky
First Social: Viral Facebook fanpage apps