Ah, the ever-changing world of Facebook! It sometimes seems just when we hit ‘submit’ on a blog post, there are more changes…but remember, change is good! Facebook has two new features for brand pages that allow you to first boost the number of people who see your posts for a small fee, and second measure the effectiveness of those posts. These are two great new marketing tools that you might want to consider taking advantage of! Here’s a quick run-down of how they work:

Promoted Posts for Your Salon:
Promoted posts are not the advertisements you see on the right hand side of your newsfeed, they are posts directly in the organic newsfeed content. Your average Facebook update with no interactive qualities will reach, on average 16% of your fans organically. Then those fans interact with the content by liking or sharing which spread's your reach to 16% of their friends etc.

Promoting your post sticks your post onto your fan's newsfeeds more often to boost views. Then your fans interact with the content more, and more of their friends are exposed to your content.

Steps to Promoting Your Posts:

1.  Write a content rich post, maybe your newest vblog or a promotion  of an event at your salon.

2. After you have posted, click promote this post. You will choose a budget of $5 or $10 and Facebook will tell you a number of estimated views depending on how much you spend.

3. Enter your payment information and the post will be pushed to your fans newsfeeds for three days.

It all SOUNDS good right? But if your salon is going to be spending MONEY on Facebook you want to see exactly how it is helping you, as you should. But would I ever steer you wrong? The partner update to promoted tweets is the analytics you may have noticed on the bottom of each of your brand page posts. Don't worry, whenever there is marketing jargon I'll break it down for you.

{Reach: How many people have seen your post}

 Here you can see that 150 people have seen this post, and that it is 22% of the people who like this page.

If you scroll over the "150 people reached" link you will see the breakdown:

There were 152 total views of this post

150 is the number of people who viewed the post so 2 people saw it twice.

{Organic: Post was viewed on the person's newsfeed.}

{Viral: the Post was shared and the viewer saw it through a friend's "share" or "like."}

If you promote a tweet there will be one more bar that says "promoted." This will show the number of people who saw the post because you promoted it.

Now if you scroll over the "22%" link you will see a percentage break down of you fans:

This page has 678 fans, and 23% of those fans have seen the post simply on their newsfeed.

If I had promoted this post it would break down the total percent to show me how many people were reached with that extra promoted boost.

We tried out the promoting technique with a client page to boost an important post – and the results were incredible. Sure, the content was equally as incredible, but not only did we double the views of the post, both the organic and viral views of the post skyrocketed.  Then we noticed that within six hours of promoting our post, our page had an additional 50 likes!

There’s no doubt that as with any new feature, there’s pros and cons, however you might want to test this feature as an inexpensive way for you to generate additional buzz and outreach for your salon. Please share your thoughts with us by posting on our Evoke Brand Strategies Facebook page, or email me at kehlers@evokebrands.com. Happy promoting!

Stay tuned for next week’s blog where we unveil the mysteries of Twitter…. 

As always, feel free to contact me at: kehlers@evokebrands.com with any questions or comments.

About www.StyleSync.me:

Style Sync is an on-line social media training, personal branding and business education platform designed specifically for salon owners and stylists to help them magnify their image and multiply their results.

Style Sync, a division of Evoke Brand Strategies, is an on-line, subscription based social media training, personal branding and business education platform designed to help individual stylists and salon owners turn social media prowess into more clients and more money for your salon.

About www.EvokeBrands.com:

At Evoke Brand Strategies we develop digital, social and mobile strategies for salon professional, beauty, hospitality and entertainment brands. As branding and public relations veterans, yet early adopters of all things digital, we understand the importance of creating measurable, buzz-worthy campaigns that generate bottom-line results.