Facebook rolls out promoted posts: Goodbye Edgerank limits

Facebook is rolling out its new innovative advertising medium, called Facebook Promoted Posts for Facebook pages. If you own a Facebook page you can now promote your status updates to your fans, forcing them to see it in their newsfeeds.

Facebook works with an algorithm called Edgerank, which determines who sees status updates from Facebook pages. Normally only a limit number of your fans are reached with a new status update. With promoting posts you now can guarantee a number of fans to see your updates.

What does this mean for businesses that have Facebook Pages?

This means you no longer have to hope and pray that your audience/fans see your latest updates. Now if you have a product launch, a special or even news that you deem really important, you can secure how many of your fans see the update in their newsfeed.

This is taking marketing on Facebook to the next level and any business not tapping into this resource, will lose out. Reaching people on Facebook with your desired message is like speaking face to face with your clients in your own niche.

How much does this cost and how does it work?

First of all, this feature is not active on all Facebook pages yet and is still in the rolling out stage. Only new updates can be promoted this way and none of your old status updates. If it is available on your Facebook page you will now see a new “Promote” button below the empty status update window.

After clicking the promote button and confirming the process with the okay button, you are taken to a new interface for promoted posts. Then depending on how many likes your page has, you get incremental pay options as below:

If you look at the pricing I am sure you will agree it is not that expensive. Think about who you are targeting: warm prospects that already like your page. This means that in the buying cycle they fall past the pre-sell step.

After posting a promoted post Facebook will show you how many people have seen it. A photo from brand expert Cinday Ratzlaff shows us exactly what the report looks like:

So this will definitely help certain brands to boost their visibility, popularity and trustworthiness when it comes to social media and their overall online presence.

Facebook of course has another way of making more money now and its new shareholders will obviously love this new idea. Please leave comments below, we’d love to hear what you think about Facebook’s new Promoted Posts feature.

Images courtesy MarketingLand