Strategic insights
Initial Test of Facebook's Promoted Posts

What actually happens when you promote a post using Facebook's new 'Promoted Posts'? Is it worth using? Is it worth paying for?

Last week, Facebook came out with Promoted Posts, which is initially only available to a relatively small group. And, one of my pages happens to be included (I have no idea why).

I wrote about my initial reaction to this new business model in "Facebook EdgeRank, Promoted Posts, And The Connection". The short version is that I think the whole concept is a scam. It's Facebook first taking our own fans away from us by filtering them out with EdgeRank, and then forcing us to pay Facebook to get them back. To me, that's like asking for a ransom. If you have not read my previous article about it yet, please do so before reading this one.

Some have suggested that it's not bad at all. They say that what EdgeRank is really doing, is just to filter out all the people who have no value and all the posts that people don't care about. That is an interesting theory, but I can debunk it with just one sentence:

If EdgeRank was truly filtering out all the people who are not valuable, why do Facebook think it is a good business model to force you to buy them back?

Clearly, Facebook knows that EdgeRank is filtering out a valuable chunk of our fans, otherwise this whole business model of promoted posts would be a failure. It's just dishonest.

The test

To see just how much an impact promoted posts have, I decided to do a small initial test, and it has been running for the past 4 days. The numbers are in, so let's get cracking.

This is just a small test. I posted a new article to my design site, 42Concepts, about something that I thought would have a good chance of going viral. The article was about a bathrobe that looks like it is censoring out parts of your body. It's a brilliant design.

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