Facebook Promoted Posts: A Tool You Need In Your Startup Kit

After the IPO, what will $5 get you in Facebook? Turns out, plenty. After this months rocky but massively important IPO, we are really starting to see changes in how Facebook is trying to monetize their platform.  Many of you have seen an additional button on Facebook posts on your brand page that says “Promote”. 

I saw this last week and was curious to see how it worked and ran a very simple experiment.  Mongo has almost 7,000 fans on his Facebook brand page, and I wanted to see how many users a message typically reaches.  It turns out that even with 7,000 likes, most posts in Facebook reach less than 7% of your user base, as my statistic shows in the image below.

So I invested $5 and made a very similar post, promoting the release of my friend Madhavi’s new app, iLuv Drawing Dinosaurs, just to see what happens.  The results were quite astounding because this post, although very similar to my earlier post, reached 28% of my audience, which is over 2,000 people!

Although it is debatable if this post actually lead to real downloads, the key learning is that it reached way more people than a normal post, and additionally, the engagement was higher, with 7 likes and 4 comments!  This is in contrast to only 2 likes in the normal post.

Many of us still dislike the new Facebook Timeline feature, but with options like promoted posts, we may have more opportunities to do some serious marketing for our apps.

Anybody else play around with this new feature?  Tell us about your results!

Guest Post written by Ahmed Siddiqui, founder of Go Go Mongo! Preschool Healthy Eating Game, and San Francisco Bay Area Leader for Startup Weekend. You can find him on Twitter @siddiquiahmed