Way back when — in September — the threat to unfriend on Facebook was reserved for your “extremist” friends. You know, the ones that aligned themselves with the opposing political party via their latest status update.
That was September. But this is October.
Now the threat to unfriend isn’t just limited to political posts on Facebook anymore. I found this out when I woke up this morning to a polite, yet stern status warning from one of my own friends. His new concern addresses Facebook’s latest paid advertising unit, the promoted post. But the promoted post he is concerned with (as are many people) is the personal version of what pages have been able to do for a while now. People can now pay to advertise their personal updates.
Imagine this. A friend updates their status and for just a couple bucks they’re able to make sure this status is seen by a few extra friends. (Gee, thanks Facebook for making this live during the height of election season.)
Personally I’m not so sure people will actually pay to do this. Does Facebook really think we’re such a vain, proud group of people that we would go to such lengths to spread our own personal agendas?
Oh, wait.
Maybe we should talk about something a little less polarizing.
Like promoted posts for pages instead. At least we can agree that it feels easier when businesses are the ones doing the advertising.
Recently, redpepper wanted to experiment using on our own Facebook page in order to share the results with you. Our goal of the experiment was to show the difference generated between a promoted post versus a normal one, and uploading our new October cover photo gave us the prime excuse for testing.
We started by posting the new cover photo and letting it sit for a few days. Then we re-posted it after it had gone stale, but this time putting a few dollars behind promoting it.
Before the promoted post, the photo had already exceeded more likes than any cover photo we had before it. But through our experiment, we were able to stack on an additional 1,212 photo likes. The bonus side effect was getting 150 new page likes after promoted post versus the 2 new ones before.
When all was said and done, our experiment yielded a 13% increase in engagement for every ONE dollar spent to advertise. Not too shabby. And we’re quite fond of our new found friends in Brazil, too.
What kind of results are you seeing from your promoted posts?
And will you carry your business practices over into your personal life?
