How to Use Facebook Dark Posts - Answering Legal

Any business that uses social media to promote its products and services should have a Facebook page. And any business that has a Facebook page should be spending a portion of its advertising budget on Facebook ads, as it creates the most value of any social media platform. Even if your business does spend money on Facebook advertising and social media marketing, you likely haven't heard of dark Facebook posts. Simply put, Facebook dark posts are unpublished posts, such as a status update, link share, photo, or video that was not meant to be published on a business timeline as an organic post.

With that in mind, here is how you can set up Facebook dark posts to work for you so that you can get the most out of your social media marketing.

Facebook Dark Posts Vs Targeted Posts

While Facebook dark posts are not exactly the same thing as a targeted post, they both allow you to promote posts to specific demographics in the fans of your page. However, Facebook dark posts have a way more specific way to target users. Unlike targeted posts, which only allow you to target an audience based on factors such as gender, age, location, relationship status and level of education, Facebook dark posts allow you to create custom keywords, such as job titles or interests, or even words that are included on someone's profile or previous posts. For example, if someone was looking for a lawyer and had posted about this previously, you would be able to find and target them with a Facebook dark post.

Setting Up Facebook Dark Posts

Now that you have an understanding of Facebook dark posts, the next step is to set one up to see exactly what types of people you can attract to your business page. To do so, you need to visit the Facebook power editor, where a lot of advertising parameters can be set. Once you open the power editor, you need to select manage pages and create a new post within your page. Make sure that that post is set to be an unpublished post (Facebook does not officially call this a dark post).

Keep in mind that the unpublished post is formatted just like a regular post, so if you know how to create a post on Facebook it is the same process. Once you create the post it will save in your list of created posts, and a half moon symbol will indicate that it’s not published. Because this functions as an advertisement, and only appears in news feeds and not on your business page, Facebook will have to approve the post before it is sent out to users as a sponsored post.

Now that you have Facebook dark posts set up, it's time to see what sort of traffic they will bring in. You can use Facebook dark posts to do split testing, which functions much in the same way that A/B testing does in email marketing. The most important thing to do in social media marketing and Facebook advertising is to be consistent, so make sure that you create a variety of Facebook dark posts on a regular basis to test out their true potential.

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