The success of any business partly lies in how efficiently and effectively it is able to target its market, its customers. For this reason, any data consisting of buyers’ interests, behavior, age, location, and other pertinent information can turn into a golden ticket for commercial ventures. And social media sites can provide such valuable data.
Your posts may be able to target by gender, age, and location, you might not be able to target for custom audiences and partner categories — both of which may be able to provide you with more significant results for your ad campaigns. Moreover, when certain published posts that appear on your business page continue to be irrelevant to specific “fans,” you risk the possibility of alienating and then losing those fans.
Facebook has just made it possible for businesses to promote “dark” posts, also known as unpublished posts, to subsets of audiences — ones that matter to the particular product, service, or campaign you are promoting. Now your business can actually come up with unpublished post ads for Facebook and have them appear on the social media site’s newsfeed.
These unpublished post ads may come in the form of a status update, a photo, a video, or a link share about your products and services. The “dark” post will not appear on your brand’s page but rather on a targeted customer’s newsfeed. For example, if you were in the restaurant business and wanted to promote a new organic vegan menu, you could send a post to vegetarian fans. If you were in the telecoms business, you could promote a post about cheaper phone plans to fans looking to cut down on mobile phone costs.
Essentially, what these unpublished posts under Facebook’s new feature will do is provide more relevant content to relevant audiences. The results may be better engagement, retained customer base, improved branding, and perhaps even increased fans from niche markets.
In addition to delivering relevant content, unpublished posts also allow you to perform A/B testing of ads. You can create two different campaigns and determine which one works best for which market.
The best way to optimize your business’s advertising opportunities through Facebook’s new and existing features is to get expert support from a professional agency that specializes in the social media platform. You not only get access to the expertise of Facebook marketers but you also get to focus more on running your business, and you will not have to worry about whether your social media campaigns are delivering results.
