The Executive Suite: What Are Dark Facebook Posts & Are They Still Valuable?

For small business owners who have to adjust dreams and goals based on their small budget, Facebook is an inexhaustible gold mine leading to increased sales, a stronger relationship with buyers, prospects, fans and followers, as well as brand awareness and superior revenues.

Facebook Supports the Growth of 40 Million Small Businesses
As a matter of fact, in 2015 Facebook counts more than 40 million small business pages, and approximately 2 million people who advertise on this popular platform. At this point, this giant networking website is so much more than a social media channel; it actually represents a mainstream, all-in-one marketing solution that will most likely stay relevant for many more years to come.
The more you analyze these hard numbers, the more you wonder: how can all these companies operating in competitive digital markets actually make a name for themselves in their niche? The answer is quite simple: they know how to reach their targeted audience and how to market their goods in an effective manner. For more than a few players, dark Facebook posts are extremely important pieces of the puzzle, enabling them to employ promotional strategies without being “un-liked” by their followers.

Using Dark Posts Reach You Can Reach Your Marketing Goals without Over-Posting
Dark posts represent the core of a social media dirty trick that marketers apply to send a message from a small business page to a narrow targeted audience, without upsetting or annoying the rest of their fans. While dark posts do not appear on your timeline, they can still be seen by a percentage of your audience, and you can decide which pairs of eyeballs will get to check out your marketing message. This is an exceptional opportunity for marketers, considering the fact that dark posts enable them to do A/B testing for the visuals and text of a new post without over-posting. This relatively new strategy enables them to get in touch with different categories of prospects in a timely fashion, without spamming the timeline of their small business page and getting un-followed by angry fans. Think about it this way: through Facebook dark posts, you get the chance to roll out dozens of versions for each update that you may have in mind, without getting labeled as extremely zealous, boring or downright annoying.

Running Dark Posts Is Actually a Pretty Straightforward Process
Now that you know that dark posts are an invaluable asset for any marketer striving to reach multiple audiences at the same time without becoming ridiculous or redundant, you may want to know how you could make the most of these elements to achieve your daily promotional objectives. Using the Power Editor, you can create updates as adverts. In the Manage Pages section, you can choose the page that you wish to use, and then select Create Post. Don’t forget to check the “This post will only be used as an ad” option, because you don’t want to publish your post. Essentially, this is the tactic that you can employ to create your advert; so you would have to pay attention to the little details that could compromise your efforts. Make sure everything looks and reads right and opt for the perfect combination between compelling text and eye-catchy images.

After adding all the essential info to your post, hit the Create Post button. The Post Preview option allows you to see how your new post will look on both mobile screens and desktops. Afterwards, with Facebook ad manager you can build a fresh campaign for every single post that you’ve come up with so far. During this phase, you can also group your adverts based on their targeted audience and relevance, assess the effectiveness of your posts and make small modifications.

3 Reasons Why Dark Posts Are (Still) Worthy of Your Attention
Once you learn how to create and run dark posts on Facebook, you realize that this method offers quite a few notable advantages. Here are a few situations in which you could feel the need to explore the power of these News Feed-style ads.

You Need to Market Multiple Products Created for Different Categories of Prospects. Let’s assume that you are currently selling four or five categories of products compatible with the needs and demands of four different audiences. Instead of promoting your goods in a general manner through multiple status updates that can be seen by all your fans and followers, you can target, inform, educate and entertain specific segments with your content without bothering the rest of your audience.
You Want to Reach Different Audiences without Over-Posting. Dark posts help you keep your page clean, avoid advertisement clutter and maintain an ideal relationship with all audiences by preventing over-posting.
You Want to Stay Active on Different Battlefields, without Losing Your Focus. Last but not least, you can keep things neat by tweaking audiences, creating and organizing adverts into various ad sets based on similarities in terms of audience or promotion tactics. While following this approach, you can easily evaluate and monitor the performance of existing adverts and implement changes accordingly, if needed.

Can These Ads Offer The Best A/B Testing Ground? Marketers Say Yes
Marketers who manage to shed some light on Facebook dark posts realize that these ads mimicking the News Feed style create the perfect platform for A/B testing and hyper-targeted messages. A/B testing conducted via these types of content help you test images and headlines and make certain necessary changes to improve conversion rates the easy way. If these adverts let you say the same thing in different unique ways and seduce multiple audiences simultaneously without becoming irritating and awfully repetitive, it means that all the versions that you create can increase your odds of survival on any online market and let you explore a great variety of hooks tailored to the particularities of distinctive public segments.

Local Events May Benefit, Too
Furthermore, dark posts are great for promoting local events by targeting specific cities in ZIP codes. You can use these adverts to your advantage to increase relevance and maintain an interesting, result-oriented dialog with all your audiences at the same time, without conveying the exact same message.