THE BENEFITS OF DARK POSTS ON FACEBOOK

Facebook ‘dark posts’ are hyper-targeted News Feed advertising in the style of native content. They’re similar in appearance and concept to a boosted post but there are some important differences that potentially make a dark post much more valuable.

Rather than appearing as advertising, dark posts look like any other post that would be on the News Feed. Of course, in creating your post using Facebook’s Power Editor, there are options for more traditional advertising styles, but for the most part there are no marked differences in the visual style of native content and dark posts.

The most unique feature of a dark post is that it doesn’t appear on your Timeline. The benefit of this is being able to target a specific subset of your audience, based on their location, gender, age and interests, without alienating anyone else who has liked your page. So, without having the appearance of generating spam, you can create several different versions of the same update that can reach very specific audiences within your fan base.

Say for example your business was selling several different products, each with a different demographic, you’d be able to promote each product to the specific demographic it appeals to without bothering the other members of your audience; maintaining the integrity of your Timeline and reducing the risk of people unliking your page.

Dark posting has additional inherent additional benefits, like being able to test different versions of posts to evaluate the efficiency of each. Tweaking the budget, image, headline, body post, and audience of these posts will allow you to find a variant that is successful for your business, both in terms of reaching the right audience and in click-­through rates. This can then inform not only your advertising strategy but also the strategy of your organic, Timeline-­based content.

In short, dark posts are highly personalised, targeted advertising that takes the appearance of native content and don’t display on your public Timeline. As such, implementing dark posting into your promotional strategy is something that can dramatically improve the success of your Facebook advertising.