How to Use Facebook Dark Posts to Reach Your Target Market – Reade Milner

With the way that the digital age has changed the way people connect with each other, it has also changed the way that businesses reach their audience, this time with a more targeted approach. This is exactly what Facebook dark posts can do.

What are Dark Posts?

Don’t be intimidated by the name, which is a mere metaphor for what it is. These posts are actually similar to your normal, everyday posts, but shown only to a chosen few. Intrigued? Exactly. This is the idea of dark posts. They are your regular everyday posts, but are not published on your page. It allows you to target people who are most likely to be interested in what your post has to say, based on their interests.  You get to create posts not only through targeting gender, relationship status, and similar parameters, but on less explicit information as well, like pages you’ve liked and apps you’ve used that interact with Facebook as well. It is targeted marketing at its best.

But what about unpublished posts?

“Unpublished posts” is simply another term for dark posts. You can create posts that would not really show up on your page, but can still be viewed by those targeted segments.

How is this done?

• Go to Power Editor and create a message.
• Add a photo or link as you usually do.
• Instead of clicking on ‘Publish Post’, leave it as is.

This post will now be available for promotion, but will not show up on your page.

What are its benefits?

Who would want to create posts, only to hide them from your page? Once you understand its benefits, then the correct answer to that question would be, everyone.

Imagine creating different posts about a single product. If you were selling coffee, you can create one post about its calorie content, one about the taste, and one about the price. Designate a little of your ad budget into each unpublished post and give it some time. After your trial period, you can check which of these posts did well on a promotional level. Now, you can select this message and post it on your page, with real data backing up your decision.

But, wouldn’t it be the same thing if you published all three ads on your feed? The answer is a big NO. Publishing all these ads would only fill up your page with promotional ads instead of quality content, something that could have your connections clicking the ‘unlike’ button faster than you can imagine. Instead of flooding people’s newsfeeds with promotional posts, you can concentrate on quality content and just squeeze in single ads here and there that have been proven to work better than the others.

Still intrigued? Test it on your page and see what a huge difference it could make.