Over the past couple of years marketers have really embraced the idea of promoting their social media posts. Many of them use the idea that if they take their most popular posts that their existing fans enjoy, they can draw in new fans by simply paying to ‘sponsor’ those posts to a wider audience. While in theory this can be a good idea, it turns out that it is not nearly as simple as that.
According to inPowered CEO, Peyman Nilforoush, it was found that about 33% of those who click on promoted posts leave the page within 15 seconds of it loading. Clearly they are not becoming engaged, or following the company in the future. To make it worse, less than 25% of all the traffic that comes from promoted posts ends up scrolling down on the page to see what else there is to see. Again, these viewers are not actually helping the company at all, other than in boosting their page view numbers.
This does not mean that promoting posts on social media is always a bad thing, however. It just means that you need to take your time and think it through before you start throwing money into this type of marketing. With proper care, and targeting your audience more precisely, you can often get excellent results at a very affordable price.
Look at the exact post that you are planning on promoting, and then think through which audience is most likely to be interested. Just because an audience may be interested in your company as a whole, for example, does not mean they will be interested in that specific post. This can end up resulting in a lot of wasted clicks.
If you are able to narrow down the number of people who see the ad, you can get much better actual results from far fewer clicks. This, of course, means you’ll be spending far less per click so you can have the budget to promote a greater number of posts. This does take more work, but it will be well worth it in the end.
