Which Facebook Page Updates Should Your Nonprofit Pay To Promote?

As you work to improve your ability to publish awesome content on your Facebook Page,  it’s a good idea to be prepared promote updates when they happen to go wildly viral.

Don’t Promote Garbage Posts

Facebook wants you to promote any and all of your page updates.

In the admin panel, they show you a post that performed poorly and suggest that you promote it (as shown below). They’ll also give you a similar nudge at the bottom of each update.

You don’t want to promote posts that have performed poorly. And you don’t want to promote a post just because it’s about your fundraiser. By promoting posts like these, all you’ll be doing is promoting garbage (stuff people aren’t interested in) out to a wider audience. In other words, you’ll waste your money.

Promote Your Best Content

When you promote content that has a already proven its virality, it’s almost a guarantee that the people you reach through promotion will also like, comment, and share that update. In other words, you are leveraging your content’s virality to get the highest return from your money.

5 Strategies for Using Promoted Posts

Assuming that you’re working on improving your Facebook content marketing game, here are three tips for using promoted posts to create more exposure for your best content.

  1. Mind the Gap–Facebook only allows you to promote your most recent updates over the past three days. This means that you should really be aware of how your content is performing each day so you don’t miss out on an opportunity to promote a post that happens to go viral.
  2. Always Be Analyzing–Facebook has made it easier than ever to know how each update is performing with real-time data located right underneath each update (as shown below).

  3. Get Notified–One easy way to be alerted about updates that go viral is to use Hyper Alerts. This is a third-party tool that allows you to receive instant notifications about your page updates.
  4. Have Cash on Hand–Make sure you have a discretionary budget for promoted posts. This way you don’t have to miss an opportunity to promote a post because you had to wait three days (see #1) for approval to spend $25.
  5. Know Thy Plan–Just because an update goes wildly viral, doesn’t mean you should spend money to promote it. Ask yourself if promoting the post makes sense in terms of your goals and branding.

Have you tried promoting your Page updates? What have you learned about which posts to promote?

Leave your insights in the comment section!