For quite a while it has been possible to promote posts added to Facebook pages, meaning pages for local businesses, restaurants, hotels, websites, blogs and similar. Not long ago I noticed that Facebook invites me to promote messages posted on my personal profile, telling me that promoting it I will „Tell friends this post is important.”
I have done some promotion of posts on Facebook quite a lot of times and it is fairly effective. It is not entirely on this subject, but last week I wrote an article named: „How Effective Are Facebook Ads When You Want New Followers for Your Facebook Fan Page?” which deals with a similar subject. Still the promotion of posts is different than normal Facebook ads. As you promote a post on a fan page, Facebook ensures you that your post will become visible to all members of your group and it will get placed high up on their news feed, making sure that they at least see it. Whether they click it or not, that is their business!
What is this about promoting profile posts?
As I first noticed the option I thought it would be something similar to promoting a fan page post, which means that my friends would see my post at the top of their news feeds for a little while making sure that they all see my post. As I clicked the promote link I got a message that the promotion price would be 1,80USD and that promoting the post would do the following:
„Now you can promote this post to move it higher in friends’ news feeds and help them notice it. Any post that you pay to promote will be marked as Sponsored.”
I gave it a go and arranged with payment details and promoted the post (tried it twice). In both cases I never really noticed any result from promoting the post. On fan pages you can see how many times your post has been seen by others, but on personal profile posts this is not possible, so I didn’t really have any chance to check out whether this was a successful move, or not. If I measure success in the amount of site visits or likes caused because of the promotion, this was a catastrophe. But I should probably give it a go a couple of more times before I make a final judgment on this.
Final word on promoting profile posts in Facebook
The promotion of profile posts in Facebook is supposed to do exactly the same as a promotion of a fan page post. Prices are somewhat similar, but at the moment you do not get information about how many people see your post, click your post and comment your post as a consequence of the promotion, which makes it impossible to judge the effectiveness of it.
Have you tried it yourself? Please share your experience… Haven’t tried it yet? Give a try and share your experience!
