Facebook Releases New Promoted Post Advertising, IntroducingPay-to-Play to Increase Reach

Facebook just introduced a new advertising option for marketers, the ability to promote status updates on a per-post basis, to increase their reach. While this feature is being rolled out slowly and is not yet live to all brand pages, we’ll outline the mechanics of this new function below, and take a peek about our own fan community’s reaction to the new feature.

Here’s what you should know about Promoted Posts:

• Promoted Posts will look just like regular news feed posts and will also appear in the mobile news feed


• Promoted Posts will be marked as “Sponsored” in the feed


• The starting price for promoting individual posts is $5.00 and the highest price is $300.00


• Posts can only be promoted within a 3 day period of their creation, to ensure the freshness of the content


• Nothing changes in terms of how posts reveal for existing fans of your brand page. Your posts have always reached a percentage of them (17% on average according to Facebook) and will continue to do that, but you now have the option to make sure an individual post reaches more fans than it normally would.


• Facebook is including a slew of analytics that demonstrate the effectiveness of the promoted ad in real time


• The promotion of each post can be paused at any time and doesn’t have to last the full 3 days


• You can now see how many fans, as a percentage of your total fan base, see any post whether or not it is sponsored.

The writers at SocialFresh took great screenshots of this feature in action. While the amount a brand is asked to pay per post differs by size of the brand (and its fan base), you can see the functionality that allows page administrators to sponsor greater post reach incrementally. In the example below, it costs the administrator $20 to promote a post to 3,700 more fans than would have seen it organically.

[caption id="attachment_3739" align="aligncenter" width="324" caption="Source: SocialFresh"]

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The option to promote posts within a budget is integrated right into the status post box. This provides a hearty prompt each time an administrator posts, to consider extending the reach their message. While there’s no need to promote every single post — it will get seen by as many fans as an average (free) one — this is a handy new advertising tool to push your brand’s message further than it would normally go.

[caption id="attachment_3740" align="aligncenter" width="513" caption="Source: SocialFresh"]

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When we broke the news to our Facebook fan community, the responses were mixed. Some users, like Michelle Pescosolido, were enthusiastic saying, “I love it! I can't wait to test it out. We have been building brands and businesses online for a few years now and all the changes have been great for better conversions. Looking forward to having this option.”

Others expressed worry that paying-to-play might push smaller brands out of the news feed. Josh McVey, owner of Rain Tree Marketing and Consulting, says, “I am skeptical. I understand Facebook has been moving in this direction for some time but it is disappointing to see money winning out over hard work (edgerank). It puts the power back into the hands of those with more money and away from those with more creativity.”

What do you think of this new feature? Will you promote your posts? Which ones will you put a budget behind? Share your thoughts in the comments; we’re happy to hear from you!

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Do Advertisers Value Facebook Ads?

In the days leading up to this week’s long anticipated Facebook IPO, the presses are running hot. Articles are cropping up left and right analyzing each S-1 amendment Facebook files, the size and strength of the secondary developer ecosystem spawned as a result of Facebook’s meteoric rise, and most of all, the valuation of the major social network. While the ultimate valuation of the company depends on many things, it is tied most closely to Facebook’s biggest revenue driver: advertising.

Facebook pulls in $3.7 billion a year in advertising revenue, a number which will likely grow with the many new advertising initiatives Facebook introduced in the past 6 months. One major update to the advertising platform is a revised premium advertising format that revolutionizes the advertising paradigm— with the new premium ads, the content is the ad. Another includes a small but intriguing test of a new ads product that allows users to promote their own content to more of their friends’ news feeds.

Not all advertisers on Facebook are completely convinced they’re seeing the desired results from their campaigns, like the latest news that GM is “reassessing its spending on Facebook advertising,” according to AdAge. While the debate about the value of Facebook advertising has strongly assembled proponents and opponents alike, at Wildfire we decided to poll our own audience of marketing professionals to see how they felt about the issue.

During last month’s live Wildfire webinar about social advertising (catch the recording here), we surveyed 645 marketing professionals, including the managers, directors, VPs, and C-level executives of some of the World’s most well known brands. Our findings reveal that marketers’ sentiment is largely positive with respect to the value of Facebook advertising— the majority of respondents were satisfied with the campaigns they’d run on Facebook, and indicated that they planned to run more social ad campaigns within the next 3 months. 90% of respondents planned to run Facebook ads in the next 9 months.

For example, when asked about how they felt about the ad campaigns they’d run on Facebook in the past, over 70% of respondents said they are either somewhat or very satisfied with their Facebook social ad campaigns.

Additionally, when surveyed about plans to run social advertising programs in the future, less than 6% of the respondents indicated that they had no intention of running ads programming in the next year.

Delving further the study looked at marketers’ goals for their social campaigns, the highest percentage of marketers indicate that increasing the brand’s fan and follower base is most important, followed by increasing the reach of branded content. Expanding the universe of users that a brand reaches is of utmost importance to marketers, and advertising is used as a tool to achieve that expansion.

When asked what success metrics qualified a Facebook advertising campaign as “good,” the results were widely distributed — to most advertisers, a good social campaign resulted in fan/follower growth, followed closely by the click-thru-rate of the ad and the reach of the content.

While GM may have made some controversial statements about Facebook ads, it has emphasized that Facebook is still core to its marketing business, and it will continue to channel significant dollars to organic branded content creation on the site. Our CEO Victoria Ransom says,

“If GM is seeking to expand their reach and engagement with their audience, there is no doubt that ads will still be an essential companion to free pages because Facebook is becoming a much 'noisier' environment with so many brands vying for consumers' attention. This trend will only increase, and brands which do not buy ads may need to reconsider in order to fully leverage the other content they have invested in.

It's natural enough to express skepticism where the technology is developing and the performance metrics are varied, but Facebook ads are a critical part of the social marketing mix… so GM may be back."

At Wildfire, we agree with the importance of branded content on Facebook. We’re curious to hear from you, though— what do you think about the effectiveness of Facebook advertising? Have you tried it for your brand in the past? What were the results for your brand, and will you be continuing these efforts?

Leave us a note in the comments, we love to hear from you.

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