This week, Facebook made a lot of marketers very, very happy.
First, it introduced Promoted Posts for Brand Pages, allowing companies to pay for posts that get front-and-center placement on their fans’ news feeds. The posts are identified with a “Sponsored” label, but they appear directly in the news feed – not on the right-side rail where Facebook ads appear.
The feature allows a marketer to set a budget for promoting each post, based on the estimated reach for a particular spending level. You can also geotarget your promotions.
Mashable has a good step-by-step guide to using Promoted Posts.
Yesterday, Facebook followed up with two more big changes: the ability to schedule posts and a new set of role-based admin tools. HubSpot has published a guide to these new features that will help you get up and running.
By the way, the Promoted Post feature also works on Facebook mobile apps. So this may also be a timely (if somewhat overlooked) response to complaints that Facebook’s ad-sales model is useless and that the company hasn’t figured out a way to monetize its mobile user base.
Calling It Quits On LinkedIn. Chris Brogan is a pretty well-known guy in the marketing business. So when he posted this kiss-off to LinkedIn and closed his account, people took notice.
Why Brogan closed his account isn’t as interesting to me as the discussion thread that resulted – all 140 comments and counting. Some people think Brogan is nuts, some wonder why it took him so long to realize that LinkedIn is a black hole for marketing ROI.
(I also can’t remember the last time I actually suggested reading the comments on a blog post, but that’s neither here nor there.)
We recently published a DemandGen Report feature that showed how B2B marketers are, in fact, getting measureable ROI from their LinkedIn efforts. But if you’re looking for another side to this story, especially if you’re using LinkedIn as an individual or to market a small business, then Brogan’s post is worth a read.
Social Media: Add It Up. Twitter and other social media sites can be a hellish experience when you think you’re talking to an empty room. Lee Odden in a recent blog post put it this way: “You might hear things like, ‘I tweeted and nothing happened’ or ‘No one in our boring industry is on Facebook/Instagram/(fill in social network here)'”
The problem, Lee says, is that people – and marketers in particular – get hung up on the visible responses to every single thing they post. And that’s the wrong way to view social media engagement.
Lee offers five tips for getting a better grip on whether your social media participation serves a useful purpose. All of them really boil down to one thing: Focus on the forest, not the trees.