Facebook promoted pages is a new feature for business pages on Facebook. The feature allows businesses to buy a bigger audience for status updates or news feed items. The idea is that, even though a business may have 5,000 fans, their updates are only showing up in 10-30 fans’ news feeds. With a promoted page, you turn up in more people feeds, thus expanding your business/product visibility on Facebook.
An example of the pay structure for Facebook Promotions
You get a few options for pay structure ranging (for us) between $5 and $30. We don’t know how much this service costs for social media BigWigs like the fabulous Skittles FB page.
Well, we tried it. We’ve tried all Facebook ads before, and didn’t really like it. Not seeing many results after putting in several hours of creative work and trying to mastermind who would see our ad. However, we still like to try all the new social things when they come out. (Our social team even spent an entire day checking out the features of Google+….we all know how that story ends…)
A snap shot of Agloves' social activity. The last day represents the promoted page day.
For our debut promoted page, we chose the $30 option. Facebook promised a 4,700 fan reach at this price. The promoted page was a contest where participants clicked “like” and “share” to enter to win a pair of Agloves Sport and an iPhone stand by clingo. We added an extra bonus that if we reached 4,500 fans we’d give away one $100 iTunes gift card.
Here is a link to our Facebook page if you are curious.
Results: We reached 4,756 people according to FB insights, had 64 likes, 30 shares and 11 comments on our promotion. We also lost 6 friends.
Pros on Facebook Promotions
- Facebook did indeed get us a greater exposure to people on Facebook.
- We had 6x more participation on our post than we normally do
- The promotion could be “highlighted” to be even more strongly featured on our page.
Cons on Facebook Promotions
- E ven though our interactions went up, our friends went down. Perhap s people really don’t like the idea of paid-for stat us updates…. or perhaps we just got onto ne ws feeds of people who would have rathe r not been bothered by our brand.
- The image on the promotion was truncated. We would have liked to have either (1) given dimensions for a good photo to upload or (2) had the option to re-size th e image to better fit the screen.
For the future?
Will we do it again? Maybe when it gets colder. Until then, congratulations to our contest winner Brandan Beckman.
If you have thoughts or opinions about this article, please write to me, Jean@Agloves.com