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Guaranteed exposure to your existing Facebook page fans sounds like an obvious way to increase engagement with posts. People who like your page are theoretically interested in either your company or your market segment. While I can’t prove the interest level of an individual Facebook user, you aren’t guaranteed someone will pay attention to your posts and engage just because they liked your page.
In fact, there’s a good chance people who never liked your page in the first place will be more likely to interact than those who did. After comparing the Facebook Promoted Post performance to Facebook Ads, I found Facebook Ads more effective at driving engagement.
Following my initial report, several people asked how Promoted Posts compare to Sponsored Stories. Based on our testing, Sponsored Stories drive far more engagement than Promoted Posts. Read on to find out how things break down.
What’s The Difference Between a Promoted Post and a Sponsored Story?
Before I dig into the performance results of our Sponsored Story vs. Promoted Post test, I want to clear up some confusion about the two types of advertising. Both receive the “Sponsored” designation next to the content of the advertisement, but these are two very different types of advertising in the Facebook universe.
Promoted Posts
When Facebook launched the Promoted Post feature for brand pages, it created some confusion for people doing ad buying. The feature appears as a Promote button attached to any status update you make on a brand page. From $5-50, you can increase the reach of your post by getting it in front of more people who previously liked your page.
I say this is confusing because a number of Facebook page managers assume that if someone likes their page, that person will see updates about the page in their news feed. The reality is that people who like a page stop seeing updates in their news feed if they aren’t interacting. A Promoted Post is a way to get the post in the news feed of fans who are no longer seeing your updates.
When you run a Promoted Posts campaign, the post appears in the news feed of fans who are no longer engaged. The same story will also appear organically for anyone who is engaged with your page.
Based on my own experience with Promoted Posts (and the stats that show additional views), Promoted Posts increase the number of times the same person is presented with a post, because the total number of views for a Promoted Post always exceeds the total unique views.
Sponsored Stories
Sponsored Stories are Facebook Ads that appear in the same places Facebook inserts other ads throughout the site. While they can be specific to your Facebook page, we primarily focus on promoting individual posts from our page. You can see the example Sponsored Story used in compiling the data for this post to the right.
Aside from the obvious difference in appearance and placement, Sponsored Stories are also different in terms of targeting. Promoted Posts go to people who clicked Like on your page. Sponsored Stories appear for people based on the targeting criteria you set up. Some of the people who see your Sponsored Story could be existing fans, but all of them will fit the target demographic you define. A Sponsored Story campaign will also be shown to targeted Facebook users multiple times throughout the course of your campaign, increasing the exposure per user.
Performance of Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts
We ran a Sponsored Story and Promoted Post for a recent post on marketing with video. For the Promoted Post, we selected the maximum reach from our 3,000 fans for $30. For the Sponsored Story, we configured a campaign targeted at people who like affiliate marketing related topics from North America, Europe, and Australia for a potential reach of 492,240 users. The actual number of people who saw the Promoted Post was 1,449. The actual number of people who saw the Sponsored Story was 37,745. The actual cost of the Sponsored Story campaign was 2.74x the Promoted Post campaign. You can see in the graph below how the campaign performance breaks down.
Cost per click for the Sponsored Story was a little less than half the CPC for the Promoted Post.
Conclusions
Targeting people based on interests remains the most effective way to capture engagement. The only area where the Promoted Post outperformed the Sponsored Story was in Social Reach. This makes sense because there are many people who Liked the page who are friends. Social Reach is only valuable if it increases engagement, which appears to be unlikely considering the outcomes of both campaigns.
If you include Actions, which are page likes, link clicks from the page (not from the ad), and page post likes, the CPC difference is even greater. The Promoted Post comes in at $0.50 CPC, while the Sponsored Story is a mere $0.15. Once again, I’m left with strong evidence that Promoted Post campaigns are far less effective than any other advertising mechanism available on Facebook.
Author
Becky is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at TUNE. Before TUNE, she handled content strategy and marketing communications at several tech startups in the Bay Area. Becky received her bachelor's degree in English from Wake Forest University. After a decade in San Francisco and Seattle, she has returned home to Charleston, SC, where you can find her strolling through Hampton Park with her pup and enjoying the simple things between adventures with friends and family.
Good post, thanks. Really helpful info.
Jake, a much needed post. Thank you so much for this. Clarifies a lot.
I found the exact same thing!
Great article. Totally my same results. Shared this on G+ 🙂
[…] http://www.hasoffers.com/blog/sponsored-story-vs-promoted-post-numbers/ […]
I think we are going to see a lot of interesting advertising opportunities come out of Facebook in the very near future. With FB going public shareholders are most likely breathing down the necks of the decision makers to start pulling in stronger revenues and profits. That will only come with ads.
Hello Jake. Nice post. Two things stood out for me:
A) “The reality is that people who like a page stop seeing updates in their news feed if they aren’t interacting.” Are you positive about this?
B) sponsored-vs-promoted-numbers.png would be a completely different graph if it showed the number of people as a % of the potential reach (instead of absolute numbers): promoted posts would come out as the winner.
Promoted Post vs Sponsored Story:
Clicks: 2% vs 0.4%
Actions: 1.6% vs 0.78%
Social Reach: 44% vs 0.62%
The above shows that promoted posts have a higher CTR (to borrow an adwords term) but who cares, right? CPC is what matters: a person reached is a person reached. The problem is this not entirely true in this case. Sponsored Story only wins if we were to compare on CPC alone. But when people act on a promoted post you are increasing the edgerank of your post, which renders more organic reach. On top of that you are re-capturing those fans who dont see your page anymore (assuming A above is correct). We cant account for that in a simple CPC figure, but that doesnt mean those extras dont have a value. I think this is the very reason sponsored stories have a higher CPC… the folks at FB knew exactly what they were doing when they gave those two types of ads different CPC levels.
What do you think?
@eduardob:disqus I’m positive that when people stop interacting with posts from a page that they gradually disappear from their feed – EdgeRank does the same thing to the friends you stop interacting with.
One thing that’s slightly misleading about Promoted Post numbers is the reach includes both organic and paid performance, so it’s never truly an apples-to-apples comparison to an ad campaign.
[…] Sponsored Stories v. Promoted Posts: With Facebook’s new Promoted Posts feature, many seem to be wondering how it differs from the Sponsored Stories advertising mechanism. The author of this particular article expresses how he finds the Facebook Ads to be much more effective at creating engagement. What’s the difference between the two? […]
Great post with some good comparative results that really help me work out which one I will be using. Thanks, Lainie Anderson http://www.thesunglassfix.com
Wow. This is great advice. It’s nice to see Social Media–that infamously difficult to measure territory in everyone’s marketing portfolio–coming up with a case study based on hardcore, quantitative data. Cheers.
actually it seems to be based on a single campaign, I wouldn’t make a rule out of it. Anyway thank you Jake for sharing data and insights on such a hot topic!
Not only is it based on only one campaign, but it is also based on only one post. The content of the post also bears a meaning for how well the target audience responds to the sponsored item.
Interesting facts for this specific example, but not at all interesting for promoted posts vs. sponsored stories generally..
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's Sponsored […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I’ve read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook’s […]
[…] Facebook’s Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I’ve read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook’s Sponsored […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I’ve read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook’s Sponsored […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I’ve read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook’s Sponsored […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's Sponsored […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I’ve read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook’s Sponsored […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's Sponsored […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's Sponsored […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I’ve read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook’s Sponsored […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's Sponsored […]
It is nice to see someone agree that Promoted Posts aren’t as effective for reaching new customers. I think promoted posts are more effective for events or product announcements… anything that requires reaching a large percentage of your current fan base.
That conclusion just isn’t true! Work out the clicks, actions and social reach as a percentage of the impressions and promoted posts absolutely destroy sponsored ads. Surely this is very basic data analysis?!
[…] Sponsored Stories v. Promoted Posts: With Facebook’s new Promoted Posts feature, many seem to be wondering how it differs from the Sponsored Stories advertising mechanism. The author of this particular article expresses how he finds the Facebook Ads to be much more effective at creating engagement. What’s the difference between the two? […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's Sponsored […]
[…] – This is what hasoffers.com (see the article here) found on Sponsored […]
[…] sehr empfehlenswert ist der Post zu dem Thema von hasoffers.com, bei dem die Sponsored Story im Test klar gewonnen […]
Wow. This is great advice. It’s nice to see Social Media
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Thanks for the article, very interesting. I just got another question, maybe anybody knows an answer. I host a brand page with almost 18k Users. Now, i promoted a post with 100 bugs and after three days, facebook told me, that post was seen by over 60k people (54k paid views). How can that be? I thought, promoted posts are only visible to my “fans”?
no, that’s not true. when you promote a post it defaults to “Target friends of connection” and that’s probably what happened.
[…] some have shown that converting-actions are higher on sponsored stories, sometimes promoted posts make more logical sense for a page. […]
[…] mensagem promovida, do Facebook, ao longo dos últimos meses. Eu já li várias artigos de blogs (o artigo do HasOffers foi ótimo) que procuraram testar a eficácia das mensagens promovidas, comparando-as com os […]
[…] mensagem promovida, do Facebook, ao longo dos últimos meses. Eu já li várias artigos de blogs (o artigo do HasOffers foi ótimo) que procuraram testar a eficácia das mensagens promovidas, comparando-as com os […]
I completely agree with Eddie. Jake, I’m afraid you’re making pretty useless comparisons if you don’t take account of the impressions when measuring the results.
“The only area where the Promoted Post outperformed the Sponsored Story was in Social Reach” – this is absolute rubbish if you take the percentages.
Great story! I see also the difference between facebook ad and sponsored story and i use the second way of advertise.. Thanks! http://www.1fly.gr
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[…] produced way more engagement with a much higher CTR (click through rate). That being said, when hasoffers performed a similar test on a smaller scale, the opposite occurred in that the sponsored story […]
[…] Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories. Promoted Posts allow marketers to pay money to guarantee exposure to fans who previously liked your business page, but are no longer interacting with your page or receiving your posts on their News Feeds. Sponsored Stories are Facebook Ads that appear in the same places Facebook inserts other ads throughout the site and reach the target demographic you define. In 2012, Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories proved more engaging than Facebook sidebar ads. More on Promoted Posts vs. Sponsored Stories here. […]
[…] Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I’ve read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook’s Sponsored […]
Is there a reason that Facebook shows a promoted post to the same user multiple times? Seems like a waste to show it more than once to the same user… I promoted a post for a Page and it showed up on my newsfeed 3 different times. So I saw the same content, 3 times…seemed unnecessary.
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