Why you should stop publishing your Facebook posts

Two years ago, the idea of not publishing a business’ Facebook page posts to their timeline would go against everything a social media strategist would stand for… How times have changed in just a couple of years!

Facebook’s Ads Manager and Power Editor recently introduced a new method of advertising for Facebook and Instagram, unofficially named Dark Posts. Dark Posts simply means posting ads disguised as updates that can only be seen on a user’s News Feed, without publishing the post to the page’s Timeline.

The News Feed – Facebook’s destination for updates by friends and pages followed – has become prime social media real estate by defaulting to ‘Top Posts’, meaning it strives to serve only the updates most relevant to the user based on their recent online engagements, from people that they’ve interacted with to websites they have visited. This has made the News Feed social media’s most competitive destination for updates. By using Dark Posts to disguise an ad as an everyday update that is relevant to a specific user, pages are likely to see stronger results.

Dark Posts are incredibly effective for e-commerce businesses, with the major draw that it allows a single ad to be customised in multiple ways to appeal to multiple markets – in description, call to action, location and demographics. For example, if your business sells a product that appeals to men and women, your ad can run under one ad set (and one budget) with different targeting specifications based on the most effective results for each market; previously, the only way to achieve this was by launching multiple different ad sets.

So, why would you not want everybody to see your Facebook page’s content? The simple answer is, people will not engage – or worse, they’ll unfollow – if a post doesn’t appeal to them! Dark Posts allow your target markets the best way to only see updates that they want to see, without annoying others with updates they don’t want to see.

Myadd offers cost-effective solutions for social media strategies to help boost your business.