Facebook Admins Can Now Promote Their Pages

Since May last year, Page administrators have been able to promote their posts. Now, Facebook has begun giving administrators based in the USA the option to promote their Pages.

Jon Loomer was the first to post about what he has called a “Promoted Page” after he noticed that the new feature had appeared on his Admin Panel.
There are three payment options given to admins who are promoting their pages: $5 per day, $10 per day or $20 per day. The $5 per day option will get your page an estimated 3 - 28 likes per day, the $10 option between 6 and 56 and the $20 option from 13 to 113 likes per day.

Loomer points out that unlike Promoted Posts, which are paid by a “lifetime budget” which lasts for 3 days, Promoted Posts  “will run indefinitely”, costing you between $5 and $20 per day until you turn the feature off again.

Administrators also have three different options when deciding who to target with their advertising: they can either target people in their immediate area, people within their state, or the entire Facebook population of the United States.

Once an administrator has set their cost and targeting, they are shown two ad previews and a sponsored story preview. The first ad is a mobile advert and the second is for desktop Facebook users. The sponsored story will appear in both mobile and desktop News Feeds.

The advantages for administrators are obvious: the new feature is incredibly simple to set up, will run indefinitely without the need for constant editing and the results are obvious and immediate.

However, the features simplicity is also its shortcoming, says Loomer: the picture and description on the ad are just the picture and description on your Page, preventing any level of customisation, as well as causing any description over 90 characters to be cut.

The targeting options are also very limited, so that many of the people who see your page advertised will not be interested in your company.

Both these issues, however, are integral to the design of the feature, which is meant to be as basic and easy to use for the administrator as possible.

Do you use Promoted Posts for your page, or the new “Promoted Page” feature? How successful are they?