Beginning today Facebook rolls out promoted posts.  You can pay in increments of $5, $10, $15, $20 up to $75 to ensure that your status post will reach more of your fans.   ($75 is the highest I’ve heard but not completely sure on max limit)

Prior to promoted posts it has been reported that on average only 3% to 7.5% of your fans are reached on any given post.  Keep in mind that engagement on a post can greatly increase your number of fans reached.  This figure was measured with brand pages that have 1,000 fans to 1,000,000 fans.  The less fans you have the higher the percentage reached.

The question is, now that there are promoted posts will the free posts reach average go even below this or stay the same?  That will be interesting to see, not too many page owners will be happy if it drops.

Why is Facebook doing this?  Well just like any other good business Facebook is looking for another source of income, especially since they just went public and their stock has dropped over 13% since opening last Friday.

Actually I am surprised that this didn’t come sooner.  Twitter launched promoted tweets for organizations and partners in July 2011 and for small businesses in March 2012.   Same concept on both social media sites, your promoted post/tweet stays in your followers/fans feeds for a longer duration of time but with Twitter you pay per click (reply, retweet, or click on link) and with Facebook it’s a small flat rate.

According to Marketing Land Facebook does provide insights on this.  It will let you know the estimated reach on the post prior to purchase and then will let you know the actual number reached after the promoted post has ran its course.

We stole some screenshots from Marketing Land because our Facebook Page has not gained access to this feature yet due to the soft roll out.

By: Robert O’Donnell
Social Media Marketing Manager at SEOPRO