Facebook has dropped its entry level criterion for Offers and Promoted Posts, meaning more Facebook Page owners can now boost their interaction
Last May, Facebook introduced a new restriction that meant only Pages with 400 ‘likes’ could run ‘Offers’ or ‘Promoted Posts’ (Facebook’s Promote button rolls out to pages with 400+ fans) in return for a fee.
But recently it has dropped the entry level to just 100 likes, making the feature much more useful for many small businesses, although they still will have to pay.
Facebook doesn’t apear to have made any official announcement, but its help centre has changed the number from 400 to 100, and of course the social network is free to switch it back, or indeed drop it completely. There’s also no guarantee it is currently available for everyone with between 100 and 400 likes. Facebook often rolls out these changes slowly.
Facebook did a similar reduction with its ‘friendly’ URLs. Once requiring 25 likes to get a memorable URL like facebook.com/mybusiness, it has removed and reinstated this restriction from time to time.
The most difficult time for any new Facebook page is the lull between creating it and reaching a marketable number of likes. The critical difference between Offers and Promoted Posts is that they are like opposites. Offers, which can be redeemed online or instore, clearly work better with a larger following. Promoted Posts on the other hand are more likely to generate interest in the page itself, so are better for getting likes. In a strategy, the use of Offers and Promoted Posts should be carefully considered. The cost is reasonably low, but it must meet your goals for it to be worthwhile.
Page admins (with under 400 likes) previously wanting to use this feature had to resort to the ungainly measure of ‘pleading’ for likes amongst their followers and their networks, just to gain access.
This was counter-productive because only genuine likes are likely to keep their traction on a page. Anyone who follows for a ‘favour’ doesn’t usually end up interacting and potentially lowers the quality score that Facebook gives its pages.
Businesses which want to increase their likes organically can promote their posts by clicking the button under each post. Critics may say that Facebook have just found another way to charge its members, but we’ve seen good results from Facebook Pages with under 400 fans that have used the feature, with ‘reach’ rising many times higher than the level it did without promotion, and new likes rising by about 5%.
Facebook resources:
Promoted Page Posts
Offers
