Sponsored Stories is Facebook’s advertising solution that offers word-of-mouth at scale. Since it’s launch in early 2011, many brands have leveraged this ad type that blurs the lines between paid and earned to amplify natural word-of-mouth from their fans across their networks of friends. One of the Sponsored Stories types, Page Posts, allows brands to use paid media to increase a Page’s distribution and visibility of a Page’s posts. By promoting posts through Sponsored Page Posts, a brand can ensure that its posts are seen by more of its potential audience, as opposed to the minor 3-7.5% of a brand’s fan base that sees a page’s post (source: PageLever).
This week, Facebook implemented two significant changes to Sponsored Stories Page Posts to give advertisers more control and flexibility over the types of stories they can amplify using paid media :
1. Advertisers now have the option to promote specific “pinned” posts. Before, advertisers could only choose to promote its most recent Page posts, which made it difficult to promote a specific post. The only way was to make sure that no subsequent posts were published after the one a brand chose to promote. This made it fairly difficult to use Sponsored Stories Page Posts without putting a pause on publishing new posts. Facebook now allows advertisers to promote a specific post in addition to promoting its most recent posts. Brands now have a viable way to guarantee a certain number of likes for a specific posts, which holds implications for Pages who use milestone-based posting tactics (e.g. “If this post gets 50,000 likes, we’ll release an exclusive Facebook-only coupon!”) or for Pages that want to take a shot at breaking Facebook-related World Records (ahem, Oreo). Brands can now continue to actively post on a Page while also boosting a specific post through Sponsored Stories Page Posts.
2. Advertisers can now leverage two new types of Sponsored Stories: Sponsored Questions and Sponsored Question Votes. With the ability to promote specific posts described above, advertisers can now promote Questions posted to Pages, as well as the votes on Questions, as Sponsored Stories. Questions provide a simple way to create engagement among fans which, in turn, generates additional stories about the brand in users’ News Feeds.
To play around with the new features added to Sponsored Stories Page Posts yourself, visit facebook.com/ads/create.
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