feature Archives - Storytailer

Let me start by saying that I’m a fan of Facebook’s Promoted Post feature in general. If your goal is to increase your Page exposure and reach not only more of your fans but penetrate their networks as well, I’ve found that they accomplish that goal. They are especially useful for smaller pages with a fan count under 1500 where the typical cost to promote a post will be in the $5-$10 range.

In the past, on a particular Page which has 164 fans, the options available for promoting a post were $5 and $10 with an “estimated” reach of usually in the 2,000 range for the $10 option. Considering that a typical Page post will reach an estimated 16% of the Page’s fans (in this case approximately 27 people), this is a considerable difference. This Page typically gets good engagement and has a slightly large reach per post – typically between 40-100 with some posts even reaching into the 700 range without promotion (although this is rare).

Recently, Facebook decided to increase the available options to Pages with a smaller number of fans. I noticed this and decided to try testing it out to see what the results were.

Here were my options:

As you can see, the potential reach increased from a maximum of 2,000 I was offered previously to 17,000. I decided to take the plunge and test out the $50 option and let the ad run its course over the 3 days (which, in case you didn’t know, is how long a single post will run in a promotion) so that I could see what the results were.

Here were the results:

As you can see, this is considerably less than the estimated exposure Facebook promised me in their “estimate” of between 9,100-17,000 for $50. In fact, this should have been the results if I had chosen the $20 option.

I find it completely unacceptable (and false advertising) that Facebook would deliver the post to about 33%-50% of the estimate I was promised for my $50. I have noticed this disparity in the past but since I’m working with some Pages that have a smaller audience and the reach promised was much less, the disparity between the “estimated” reach and the final number has never been that large.

Bottom line is that, while I still think Facebook’s Promoted Post (or Boost Post as they’re now calling it) option is a good value for exposure, I will no longer have any confidence in the “estimated reach” promised.

Yo, Facebook. You owe me $30.

Facebook is rolling out a new feature in which people are able to “reply” to comments on your Page’s posts creating a threaded comment so that replies to other comments aren’t mixed in with this big long (hopefully) chain of comments. This is great for Facebook pages with a ton of fans and is designed to help those Page administrators manage the conversations better.

To qualify, you are supposed to have a Page with over 10,000+ fans BUT, I was able to turn it on for my blog’s Facebook page and it only has (at this point) 624 fans.

If you’re a Page administrator, you may want to go into your Admin settings and see if you can turn this feature on or not. It’s super helpful in encouraging comments and keeping track of who is responding to whom and managing, responding and engaging in these conversations.

This is how you do it:

Go to your Facebook Page.
Click “Admin Panel”
Click “Edit Page”
Click “Manage Permissions”
Scroll down and you will see a checkbox that says “Replies”, check that box and click “Save”.

If the feature is turned on, you should have “Replies” enabled. Find one of your posts and comment on your own post. If replies are enabled, an additional option to the comment will be “Reply”.. Ouila! Let me know if this is working for you or if I just won some sort of Facebook lottery or they consider me a superstar and are just getting me ready for this huge influx of fans in advance. (crossing fingers).

This is what your post comments will look like if you’re able to activate this feature on your Facebook page:

Or you can watch this video (or read this article) by Christian Karasiewicz that will walk you through it.