Facebook Advertising Mistake #94 – Promoting Posts That People Don’t Like

Own a Facebook page? Your first Facebook ad experience may have been the boost button.

I’m happy you got into Facebook ads!

But chances are you made two big mistakes:

1. You used Boost instead of the Ad Manager, which gives you more options and power.
2. You probably boosted a post that wasn’t doing as well as you’d like. That’s the wrong kind of post to promote. You should promote the posts that do well, not the duds.

I understand. I’ve done it. I’ve posted something I loved and then heard…. a thundering silence.

“People should love this post!” I say to myself. “Why aren’t they liking it? I just need to promote it.”

This is a counter-intuitive pearl of wisdom for you:

Facebook rewards you with lower ad costs when your promoted post gets a higher click-through rate. [Click here to tweet this]

How do you know if your posts are resonating? Calculate the percentage of post viewers who liked the post. That’s your engagement rate. It’s should be above 1%. If it’s lower, you’re not creating the best messaging for your audience.

Each of these posts has its engagement rate on it.

See how widely engagement rate can vary? From 0.4% to 8.2% in just these eight posts.

Your Facebook post engagement rate should be over 1%. When you excel, you’ll get 3-7% or more. We’ve seen 11.8%. [Click here to tweet this]

We’ve seen posts get liked by as many as 11.8% of post viewers.

If your post isn’t doing well, it isn’t resonating with your audience. Keep track of what your audience likes and doesn’t like. Put the duds in your “what I shouldn’t do anymore” column. You learned something about your audience. There’s something in that post they don’t care for.

The most common reasons people don’t like posts are:

• The post is too self-centered. It’s about you or your company. Make it about your audience. What’s in it for them? Focus on the benefits of your service or product to them. Paint a picture of their dream. How awesome will their work or life be like after they’re your customer?
• The post is too obscure. No one cares that you love the band Rush. Sorry! Enjoy that by yourself.
• The post is too edgy. Edgy works with certain audiences. But it can backfire and turn people off. They may hate it. They may think liking it publicly would make them look bad. And beware: edgy posts can get a lot of interaction and shares but ultimately hurt your sales.

Find the posts that ARE resonating with your audience. Go for a 3% of those who view it click like on it. Promote those posts.

And by the way, likes correlate more with greater reach than shares do. See the R values in the charts below?

Spend more ad money on the posts that give you the BEST response, not spend more trying to push through the ones people don’t respond to.

The lever Facebook gives us to lower cost-per-whatever with high CTR is dramatic. It’s much more than AdWords gives us. This is why Facebook ads can be so incredibly effective and efficient. You are rewarded handsomely for testing and learning.

I have a post that got 80,000 likes and 35,000 shares for $200 spend. It reached 424,000 people. As soon as I saw that a high percentage of people were liking it and tagging their friends in it, I spent more ad money on it. I was able to get 6 post-likes per penny.

Facebook rewards you for advertising interactive posts. Facebook punishes you with higher ad costs when you promote less interactive posts. That’s going against the flow. Just like Google, Facebook wants you to put out relevant messages. Stop fighting the tide, and go with what your audience wants.

So you’ve created Facebook ads that promote your highly interactive posts. Now what? Duplicate those ads to test 3-5 different ways to target your audience. For example:

• Different interests
• Different job titles
• Different consumer behaviors
• More or less focused demographics
• Much wider targeting

You’ll find that testing the targeting will help you get much more affordable interactions, and lower your Facebook advertising costs.