The term “dark” is usually associated with negative issues, but there is absolutely nothing nefarious about the Facebook™ dark posts. They are, in a manner, a hidden way of advertising your products, but this is only with respect to your own company page newsfeed.
How to Create a Dark Post in Facebook™
Before we actually explain the how part, let us deal with the why. Why would you use dark posts and, for that matter, what are they? Dark posts are newsfeed-style ads which will not appear on your own company newsfeed, but only in the newsfeeds of targeted audiences.
Why would you not share these posts on your Facebook™ page? There are various reasons, and most of them have to do with selected targeting. Many companies sell various products, targeted at people belonging to different age groups, with different backgrounds and interests. So, an ad or shared content which would appeal to a certain targeted group may be completely unappealing to another. Thus, the company could lose all their followers, for the simple reason that their ads, shared together, are turning away various customer groups.
How can such a company market its products efficiently to each group without exposing others to irrelevant content for them? By using dark posts! In this manner, each separate audience is exposed to the right message, without seeing messages meant for another audience. This is quite interesting, right? Then let’s see how to create a Facebook™ dark post:
- Go To Power Editor – in the top left corner, click on the symbol consisting of 3 horizontal lines and click on the All Tools option.
- Go to Create and Manage -> Page Posts – once you click on this option, you will get a pop-up panel in which you will create the post: headline, content, link to, image/video (just as you would create an ad using the Facebook™ tools)
- Select ‘This post will only be used as an ad’ – once you have created your post, you can opt between sharing the content as a dark post or as a published post on your page.
- Click on Create Post and you are done.
So, what are some practical situations in which dark posts are more useful than other types of promoted content? Here they are:
- A/B Testing
When you are testing several newsfeed-style ads, it would be annoying to flood your follower’s newsfeed with your content with slight differences. They may believe you shared some of the content by mistake, before you were finished with editing. By opting for dark posts, you can effectively split your audiences and show each group a different version of the post, without interferences.
- Very Specific Targeting without Spamming
Good marketers have a very detailed classification of their target audience by groups and subgroups. Dark posts are the only way in which every specific subgroup can be targeted with messages without spamming the larger group they all belong to. In this manner, you can reach very specific goals for your marketing campaigns and you can confidently create and share super-targeted posts aimed at the precise audience for which they are appealing.
- Avoid Offending Various Groups
Should you run a Christmas promotion or a Hanukkah promotion? Or both of them? But is there a way of running both these campaigns without offending the other religious group? Yes, there is. By creating each ad as a dark post targeted at each specific group, you can run these campaigns in parallel and not create any kind of rift between your followers.
Basically, dark posts will hide content from a portion of your followers which are not included in the target audience and help you keep everyone happy on your Facebook™ page while running highly targeted ad campaigns.