To give your content and Page an added boost, Facebook Ads are a great tool. Keep one thing in mind: Just because you promote a post, don’t assume that it will make the post go viral. For a post to actually become popular and drive a large amount of engagement, the content itself has to be good. The quality of a post is determined by its engagement level. The engagement level of a post will not change no matter how many people see it.

There are three options to promote your posts on Facebook:

1. Promoted Posts
2. Promoted Page Post
3. Suggested Posts (beta)

Promoted Posts

This is the best advertising tool that Facebook offers. It allows you to promote your content directly in user’s News Feeds, where users focus their attention, as opposed to the sidebar – which users generally ignore.

A Promoted Post gives your post reach to more of your fans and your fans’ friends (a normal post is only seen by approx. 16% of your fans). To create a Promoted Post, simply create a post as normal and click the “Promote” link in the bottom-right corner of the post.

As you can see above, they give you options to promote to just your fans (people who like your Page) or both your fans and friends of fans. Depending on your current number of fans, you will have a different set of budget options: The more fans you have, the higher you can set your budget and the more users you can reach. Facebook automatically sets the promotion to run for three days, and will use the budget equally over that time period.

During a Promotion you can see the performance stats by clicking on the “Promoted” hyperlink on the post.

You can also see the level of paid vs. organic vs. viral engagement by clicking on the “## people saw this post” hyperlink in the bottom-left-corner of the post.

Promoted Posts appear to users in one of two ways:

• If a user is a fan of a Page, they will see the post like normal directly at the top of their News Feed, they are just more likely to see the post in their News Feed
• If a user is a friends of a fan of a Page, they will see that one of their friends Likes the Page.

Promoted Page Posts

Promoted Page Posts are ads that appear in the sidebar of Facebook. They are much less effective, but allow you to target hyper-segmented markets that have no connection to your Facebook Page.

You can create Promoted Page Posts in the Facebook Ads Manager. Once there, you can target users by a wide range of data points, including demographics, interests and Likes:

Suggested Posts (beta)

As of this writing, Facebook is currently beta-testing a new product called “Suggested Posts”. These appear in the News Feed just like Promoted Posts, but can be promoted to users who are not your fans or friends of fans. This gives you the ability to reach entirely new markets, but may come at the cost of annoying users.

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