FACEBOOK ADS STUDIES BY SOCIALBAKERS

HARNESS THE POWER

OF PAID POST PROMOTION

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion

01
Introduction

Facebook is the world’s premier platform for reach

and engagement - but if you’re a brand, your Facebook
content is only as good as your best promoted posts.
13.5%
of Brand Content
Just look to the data - around the world, brands promoted was promoted this summer
just 13.5% of their content, but got more than half of their
total interactions from that small portion of their posts.
In order to successfully use Facebook to engage Fans and attract new business,
you need to be able to identify top-performing organic content and promote it
to your ideal target audience. 51.7%
of their total interactions was
generated by these posts

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion

02
The First Step

How Do I Find Out If I Should

Promote My Posts?
Different industries promote content to different extents - and the biggest
promoters aren’t necessarily the most successful. It’s important to first determine
if your success metrics are falling, or lag behind your competition’s standard.
You can use private metrics to figure out individual Page reach and post
interactions, but to compare all of your Pages in depth, and to see how they
compare against industrial, regional, or personalized sets of competitors, you’ll
need to use an enterprise social media analytics tool like Socialbakers Analytics
with Promoted Post Detection (PPD). PPD’s industry-leading accuracy enables
marketers to compare competitors’ interactions from promoted and organic posts.

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion

02
The First Step
BRANDS

Beverages

FMCG Food

Alcohol

Telecom

Beauty

Electronics

Finance

Airlines

Efficiency
Retail Food

Auto

The industries that publish the most total content are also some
Paid vs Organic Post Ratio
Retail
13.5% of all branded posts around the world are promoted.
Ecommerce
of the least effective. They drag down the overall Paid Efficiency
Fashion
Index for brands around the world, although the PEI for brand Pages
Accommodation

is still a healthy 6.9x.

5% 10% 15% 20% 25%

BRANDS BRANDS

Finance Beverages

Beverages FMCG Food

FMCG Food Alcohol

Retail Food Telecom

Beauty Beauty

Electronics Electronics

Accommodation Finance

Telecom Airlines

Alcohol Retail Food

Retail Auto

Auto Retail

Airlines Ecommerce

Fashion Fashion

Ecommerce Accommodation

5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%

BRANDS

Finance

Beverages

FMCG Food

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion

Retail Food

Beauty

Electronics

Accommodation

Telecom
03
Promotion Effectiveness
Why Should I Promote My Promoted Posts Strategy Jul 07 - Oct 04, 2015

Best Posts?
When you promote your best posts to a well-targeted audience, you are getting
more valuable reach. Think of brick-and-mortar stores; reach is equivalent
to the number of people who pass your storefront, and total interactions
are the people who come in and engage with your products or services.
With promoted targeting, you’re getting interactions from a more relevant
audience - and thus getting more value for your social promotion.
In this Promoted Posts Strategy graph, taken from PPD
in Socialbakers Analytics, we compared the Promotion
Efficiency of four brand Pages - Nutella USA, L’Oreal Paris,
Jägermeister, and Reynolds Kitchens - by looking at the
intersection between the amount of posts they promoted
and the amount of interactions they got from those
promoted posts.

There are many ways to get the most out of your Facebook ad budget,
but the best ones all use social media analytics tools to get data-driven results.

Promotion Effectiveness Comes

in Different Forms
Using PPD, we found a few different patterns among brands with a high Promoted
Efficiency Index (those that got many times more promoted interactions than they
did organic - also called PEI).

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion

03
Promotion Effectiveness
The best examples are Pages like L’Oreal Paris. They selectively promote their
best-performing organic content and get many times more promoted interactions
than they do organic engagement. In general, we’ve found that brands like these
Post in Time Jul 07 - Oct 04, 2015

In the Posts in Time chart, you can see that all of L’Oreal’s
ideally:
promoted posts rose above their organic content and
represented added value for the Page.
Post content regularly

Promote less than 50% of their content

Have a high PEI (around 10x)

This is the global standard, but many brands with great promoted efficiency still
don’t reach it. The other three brands in this example illustrate ways brand Pages
can get excellent efficiency, but still not promote Facebook content as well as
they could.

For all of these Pages, promoted posts are much more engaging than their
organic posts, meaning that the posts they promote are the kind their audiences
want to see. Getting that right is the most important part.

But publishing the right amount of promoted and organic content matters, as well,
and these strategies don’t get that right.

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion

03
Promotion Effectiveness
Jägermeister
Publishes regularly, and promotes the right content - but they’re also leaving
Number of Posts by Post Type Jul 02 - Sep 29, 2015

value on the table by not promoting more content that their audience likes.

Nutella
Doesn’t publish enough content overall, although they get great value
from the content they promote. By publishing more content and setting a higher
minimum standard for engagement on organic content, they could save money
by promoting fewer posts while still getting the same kind of engagement value
from them.

Reynolds Kitchens
Is the exception - they use other platforms (like Instagram) to test out different
content, and then promote all of their pre-tested content on Facebook.
This strategy is also effective, but it’s not quite as reliable as testing content
on Facebook first. The best thing to do is monitor engagement in real-time
on Facebook before promoting the most-engaging posts.
Again, each of these brand Pages performs well - but they could get even
more value out of their content strategies.

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion

04
Boosting
How Do I Know When To Boost?
If your results aren’t like any of these examples, there are some concrete steps
Post Distribution Paid & Organic
Here’s a breakdown from some top FMCG brands of how
you can take to change your strategy on Facebook and get more value than ever different post types get promoted. For FMCG brands,
from social marketing. fun/interactive posts are the most commonly promoted posts,
but brand videos are also very likely to be promoted.
First, analyze the posts your audience engages with most
in order to determine what type of content you should 100
Paid Organic N/A

post. That could include your own posts, your direct 80

competitors’, or other Pages that do a great job

60

40

of reaching an audience like yours. 20

Once you’ve figured out what it is you would get the most value from promoting,

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Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion
05
Post Promotion
Key Takeaways
Set minimum standards for your KPIs. Only when a post surpasses
those in their first hours should you promote them (Socialbakers
Analytics’ Realtime Interactions chart makes doing this easy).

Realtime Interactions Jul 02 - Sep 29, 2015

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion

05
Post Promotion
Key Takeaways
Promote strategically important posts such
as those featuring your latest campaign

Promote conversion-driving posts such as those that have

a “sign-up”, “buy”, or similar call to action.

Promote at the right times! Make sure you know when

your audience is online.

Promote around special events critical to your industry - Fashion

Weeks, Restaurant Weeks, Trade Shows, etc.

Promote only those posts that get the best organic results
(such as high reach and engagement).

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion

 Contact Us

Contact sales@socialbakers.com to learn more

about Socialbakers solutions that can help you become
one of the best in your industry on social media!

Harness the Power of Paid Post Promotion