Everybody wants to drive cost effective clicks on Facebook, they have the largest social audience on the web and a continuous flow of users coming back everyday.
If you have tried Facebook Ads before you have probably seen an option called “Sponsored Post”, and for most the terminology of measuring results from “Sponsored Post” might be rather ambiguous as Facebook in general does not do a great job of explaining their ad products. Sponsored Post though is the symbol of Facebook marketing as it embodies everything Facebook wants marketers to do which is drive incremental engagement through social conversation about a particular topic.
Sponsored Post usually works best when you take a particular side of an argument and pose a question or do something to drum debate. The ultimate goal as a marketer is to look beyond the click when running Sponsored Post. The back end goal is to drive likes, comments, and other engagement to that particular post. Once this happens we have “social proof” and has this proven time over time for me to increase conversions.
Also within sponsored post you can target friends of people who have engaged with your post, this is kind of what “sponsored stories” used to be but now it’s rolled up into Sponsored Post. This type of advanced targeting we have seen has also resulted in ads getting higher CTR.
Another thing I have noticed is that Facebook tends to serve ad impressions first to people who are running sponsored post because it usually results in increased social conversation and engagement. I know from running ads over the years Facebook’s algorithm has a waterfall like mechanism of serving impressions based on campaign objectives.
The other rather amazing by-product of running Sponsored Post is that if you start running Sponsored Post for a long period of time, your edge rank will also go up. I have seen this happen time over again for my fan page. Edge Rank is the algorithm developed by Facebook to govern both what is displayed and how high on the newsfeed. The more engagement you have within your fan page even if it’s sponsored the higher your Edge Rank.
I like to keep a “Sponsored Post” campaign just to continually increase my Edge Rank even if it’s not converting.
The effect of a higher “Edge Rank” can be seen in the number of organic people you reach when you post on your fan.
