Facebook had 2.07 billion monthly active users in 2017, making it one of the most effective digital marketing platforms. But in the scramble to create new and better content, it can be all too easy to overlook grassroots methods that'll sure up your current strategy and boost conversions.
The key is to build your campaigns smarter, rather than faster. And the best way to kickstart your new strategy is by leveraging Facebook dark posts.
Here's everything you need to know about dark posts and how they can help you boost your conversions.
It's All About the Engagement
Post engagement is a measure of how extensively an audience interacts with a post. In Facebook terms, we're looking at the comments, likes, and shares that a post accumulates from its target audience.
Engagement is also an often overlooked but incredibly powerful way of optimizing your ad campaigns. This is because Facebook's own ad algorithm rewards more engaging ads.
How does it do this?
Post engagement acts as social proof, telling Facebook that your ad is relevant to its audience. Due to the nature of the Facebook ad auction, the higher relevance score your ad has, the more chance it's going to be shown over its competitors.
Higher relevance scores also lead to lower CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), which will save your campaign money.
How Can Engagement Boost Conversions?
Obviously, the more your ad is shown to your target audience, the higher your chances of conversion, but there's another factor to consider as well.
It comes back down to social proof.
Social proof, also called informational social influence, is a social and psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others. They do this to try and behave correctly in a given situation.
Post engagement impacts social proof because it shows your audience that others have engaged with your post. This then influences them to do the same.
Enter the Dark Post
Facebook has a heap of different ad formats. If you have one ad that you'd like to present in multiple formats, you'd typically create multiple ad sets.
The downside to this method is that any engagement one of your ad formats receives isn't automatically assigned to your other formats, even though they're all essentially the same ad. You're splitting your social proof.
This is where dark posts come in.
Dark posts are essentially unpublished page posts. Savvy marketers would use them to create a template of their ad. Then, using the dark post unique ID, they would clone that ad by using Facebook's "use existing post" functionality.
The end result was a suite of different ad formats, all using the same content, with the same unique ID across all of them. That unique ID allowed the engagement to be shared across all formats.
Wait, Why Are You Using the Past Tense?
In the recent past, you could create a dark post that included all the elements of a regular ad, including title, destination URL, CTA, media, post text, and more. Now, Facebook dark posts only let you input URL, post text, and the CTA button.
But all is not lost. The same principle can be applied using the unique ID of regular, published ads. It's not technically a dark post anymore, but the benefits are all the same.
Boost Conversions Through Social Proof
Dark posts aren't exactly what they used to be but the principle is still the same. By making your ad campaigns smarter, you can capitalize on your social proof and drive more conversions than ever before.
Looking to boost Adwords as well? Here are 4 tips for maximizing your Adwords campaign right now.
