Pay For Posting on Facebook Pages

This month Facebook released a number of new advertising methods for business Pages. But I’m going to focus on one which I think will become very popular with small businesses because it will help save time and simplify advertising those short lived business promotions, such as weekly sales or discount offers. It is the method to pay for posting on Facebook Pages in order to increase the visible reach of the post to the fan base.

One issue small businesses always found difficult was to work out strategies to ensure their posts got seen by as many of their fans as possible. Examples of these strategies have been:
★ what day to post,
★ what time to post,
★ adding an image to increase clicks and life of posts in feeds.
Recently a time saving strategy called ‘pinning’ would help keep a promotional post visible at the top of a business page. But as much as this is a time saver for small businesses it wasn’t improving the reach of fans it was being delivered to unless they continually posted it again or timed adding comments underneath the original to keep it in their fans news feed (where 80% of us catch up on what’s happening in Facebook World). Now by paying to increase the length of time the post stays in the news feed these promotional posts are more likely to be seen by more of their fans.

Another new change in Facebook Pages released at the same time – not by accident I’m sure – is the addition of your individual posts reach of fans. This is not new feedback, it has always been available to Page Admins in their insights but Facebook needed businesses – particularly small businesses to be more aware of what their average reach is in order to understand the big advantages from such a small fee. A common error a lot of small businesses make is to assume ALL your fans see ALL your posts. Realistically, unless it’s something exciting and potentially viral only on an average of 16% of your fan base EVER see your posts, this is likely to get worse as more and more businesses start creating a presence in Facebook. By having the reach displayed under the post businesses are just more aware of what type of posts are working better than others.

So, now that I’ve covered how and when small businesses can benefit from a pay for posting on Facebook pages method, lets look at how to use it. Here is an image of Facebook Page’s post box where you will find the option to promote underneath.

As you can see when you click “Promote”, you will have the option to pay to increase your posts reach of fans. Facebook can only give you an estimate of the potential reach as they have no control how often your fans will visit Facebook over the period of promoting the posts for you.

Once you have selected the amount you are prepared to pay, click on the “More Options” and you will see the duration is set to expose your post in your fans news feeds for the next 3 days. If you already have a Facebook Ad account you will also see your default payment option information pulled in also.

The little cog wheel in the bottom left corner is useful for links to change your payment method or accessing the help center about questions directly about the new Facebook pay for promotional posts.

Let me know below in the comments if you have any questions or your feedback on this as I really do see this being a great way for small businesses not to lose their voice amongst the more heavily trafficked posts from big branded pages people follow. I’d also love to see some examples of how it may have increased your reach on any posts where you have used it too – so add them below in the comments.

Another change worth making is setting the various Facebook admin roles to increase the security of your page if there is more than you in there otherwise you might want to scroll through a few other Facebook marketing strategies I’ve written about.

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