Facebook dark posts are one of the smartest content targeting strategies available on the network. Here, we’ll explain how TrackMaven’s new feature for tracking dark posts helps marketers monitor and report on their success.
What are Facebook dark posts?
Facebook dark posts, also known as “unpublished posts,” are ads that won’t appear on your brand’s Facebook page, but will show up natively in the news feeds of Facebook users.
For example, imagine that you are a marketer for a dog toy brand. You’re looking to increase conversions and sales from your brand’s Facebook page, so you decide to target corgi-owning LeBron fanatics on Facebook who would love your new NBA line. How would you go about that? The answer: Facebook dark posts. Dark posts are the perfect way to deliver this kind of targeted content to niche audiences.
Why are Facebook dark posts important for marketers?
Before the era of dark posting, marketers were limited to either publishing all branded content on Facebook pages or placing ads on Facebook’s right rail. These practices can lead to audiences seeing content that is irrelevant to them — possibly alienating them from your brand — and being turned-off by the intrusiveness of right-rail ads.
In the past six months alone, the marketing teams we work with have utilized dark posts thousands of times to avoid spamming their audiences with irrelevant content. In addition, they’ve created hyper-targeted content and performed A/B tests for headlines, captions, images, and audiences. Now, with the launch of Facebook dark post tracking, our customers can track these dark posts directly in the TrackMaven platform.
The TrackMaven platform allows marketers to monitor and report on the success of these dark posts alongside the rest of their brand’s Facebook content. That means all of the analytics that are important to your brand’s Facebook success are available in one place. Here’s how you can put this new feature to work for you:
Three ways to perfect your Facebook dark posts using TrackMaven:
1. Test. Measure. Repeat.
Dark posts are a fantastic mechanism for testing different messaging, images, and offers on Facebook before creating a post or campaign for the masses. But trying to glean insights from testing many different posts with often subtle differences is challenging.
TrackMaven’s tagging feature can help. Organize your dark post content for each test with tags and compare the performance of different versions. In the TrackMaven Content Feed, you can sort posts to surface those with the most impact or engagement.
2. Analyze your efforts.
Targeted dark posts can help you create the most relevant and impactful content for segments of your audience. However, it’s important to find the right balance between broadcasting content to your brand’s entire Facebook following and creating more targeted posts. This balance allows you to spread broader messaging and gain new followers, while also effectively nurturing your existing followers with targeted content that addresses their specific needs. By using TrackMaven’s Content Feed Export, you can quickly calculate your ratio of broadly published to targeted dark posts.
In the TrackMaven platform, you can select a relevant time frame and filter the Content Feed for Facebook organic, paid, and dark posts, then download the the results as a CSV file.
3. Know your ROI.
TrackMaven’s Spend vs. Interactions graph visualizes how boosting content correlates with engagement. You can use this interactive graph to discover trends in your content performance and identify outliers that are performing well with little spend.
Viewing your dark posts on the Spend vs. Interactions graph is an effective way to compare the results of A/B testing. You can see which dark posts in your A/B tests had the highest number of interactions relative to how much spent. In addition, comparing the metrics from posts designed after A/B test results to your other posts is helpful in understanding your return on tests using dark posts.
Dark posting can be an effective, and often inexpensive way, to speak directly to niche audiences. Whether you’re looking to create hyper-targeted messaging or use A/B testing to drive content creation, TrackMaven’s analytics will help you perfect your Facebook dark posting strategy.
Want to learn more about TrackMaven? Request a demo today!