Why you should use Facebook dark (unpublished) posts

Posted on by Marie Page

Back in the day (and I’m talking something like 2013) the only way you could get nice big images in newsfeed ads was to create a dark (unpublished) post and then promote that.

It was a neat, but somewhat laborious, workaround until Facebook finally got round to awarding click to website ads decent visibility.

So I’ve been somewhat bemused since then to hear experts such as Gary Vaynerchuk continuing to endorse the merits of the dark post.

Of course they are useful for split testing ads but surely most Pages doing that level of advertising are creating ads from scratch rather than needing posts to promote and/or using one of the proprietary ad platforms that simplify testing for you?

So I have been somewhat perplexed by the continued existence of the dark post (Facebook calls them unpublished posts).

Until now.

I was working my way through Facebook’s new ad objectives for a new masterclass and stumbled upon a reason to return to dark posts.

It’s all tied up with the exciting new Reach objective.

What’s got the likes of Jon Loomer excited is the ability with the Reach objective to control the number of impressions people in your ad audience see.

We’ve all felt somewhat spammed by the same ads that appear in News Feed day after day. With the Reach objective Frequency Cap you can set the number of days before your ad is shown again to the same person.

 

This is great for when you want to reach as many people as possible in an audience rather than reaching a smaller number multiple times. I’m using it for retargeting website visitors – a warm and valuable audience.

It’s different to the Daily Unique Reach bidding option because whilst with Daily Unique Reach you wouldn’t reach the same person more than once per day you might still be bombarding them with content EVERY day.

But when you go to create an ad using the Reach objective you don’t get an option to create a link post – it’s just a photo post unless you have an existing post you can use to promote.

Here’s how the two post types look:

See how the photo post on the right doesn’t have the title, body copy and url link below the image. And if you click on the image you just get taken to a close-up of the image rather than the website you want to direct the user to. To get them to that website you are going to need to put a link in the text above the image.

This looks pretty unprofessional and likely frustrates a lot of users who click on the photo thinking they will go to the website.

The solution is therefore either to promote an existing organic post when you create your ad using the Reach objective (but I’m not convinced that an update written with your Page audience in mind is always going to be optimal in terms of image and copy for an ad audience) or to create a dark post and use that instead.

I go into detail about how you do that in our new Digiterati Academy masterclass.

^Marie Page

Marie Page

About Marie Page

Marie Page is one of the UK’s leading Facebook marketing experts. She is a founding partner of digital marketing consultancy The Digiterati and the Digiterati Academy e-learning portal for marketers and entrepreneurs. Her award-winning Master's Dissertation was the culmination of three years' academic research into Facebook that resulted in a book (and companion online course) 'Winning at Facebook Marketing with Zero Budget' that became an Amazon bestseller. Marie's work on the Facebook News Feed algorithm was featured in The Huffington Post. A recognised thought leader on social media, Marie is often approached by journalists for comment in articles such as this Telegraph article. She was also interviewed for ITV's Tonight show on Facebook privacy issues in relation to advertising. Marie is a regular guest on digital marketing blogs and podcasts including Social Media Examiner and Smart Insights. In 2018 she is speaking at Brighton SEO, Europe's biggest search and marketing conference. Marie is also author of two Smart Insights books: 'Smarter Guide to Facebook Marketing', now in its fourth edition, and 'Facebook Ads Guide', both edited by Dr Dave Chaffey. Marie is also a part time yoga teacher.

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