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When you first hear of Facebook dark posts, you can be a little thrown back. The term itself sounds pretty sketchy, if not downright sinister.
Should you really get yourself into it?
The answer is yes. Facebook dark posts aren’t connected to the dark web, and they’re not part of the dark social.
They’re something better.
These posts will help you target your audience in ways you haven’t even dreamed of.
They’ll allow you customize your campaigns at lower costs, keep your organic traffic visible, and engage with your audiences at a deeper level.
This article will tell you what dark posts are, why they work, and how to use them.
We’ll talk you through different optimizing techniques and also share the drawbacks.
Keep reading below!
TL;DR - Facebook Dark Posts
- Facebook Dark posts, or unpublished posts, are targeted ads that don't show on your timeline but appear as sponsored content to specific audiences.
Advantages:
- Increased Social Proof: All likes, comments, and shares are visible to every targeted person.
- Precise Audience Targeting: Go beyond generic variables like age and gender; target specific keywords or job titles.
- Better A/B Testing: Experiment with different ad features to find the most effective ones.
- Enhance Other Content: Use dark post insights to refine other posts.
- Prevent Spam: Avoid overwhelming your audience with repetitive ads.
Influencer Marketing Benefits:
- Accumulate more social proof.
- Streamline and simplify campaigns.
- Target lookalike audiences effectively.
- Receive direct feedback from select audiences.
Creation Process: Use Facebook Ads Manager to create, schedule, or publish dark posts.
Optimization Tips:
- Conduct A/B tests to gauge engagement, click-through rates, or conversions.
- Prioritize efficient ads; duplicate and adjust for various audiences.
- Engage with users by replying to comments.
Drawbacks:
- Dark posts cannot be edited once created; a new post would mean losing previous engagement.
- Tracking multiple campaigns can be challenging due to UTM parameters; use Facebook's URL Parameters feature for updates.
Conclusion: Despite minor drawbacks, dark posts offer numerous benefits, leading to higher engagement and better ROI. Consider seeking expert help of a Meta advertising agency for effective implementation.
What Does Dark Post Mean in Facebook Advertising?
Facebook Dark posts, aka unpublished posts, are targeted posts that:
- Don’t appear on your timeline and your followers’ feeds.
- Appear as sponsored content in the feeds of people you’re explicitly targeting.
How did these dark posts become so widespread?
Traditional Facebook ads face a significant issue: they lack social proof. When you create an ad using Facebook Manager, that ad gets a unique ID. That means all your ads are individual. Apart from this, you can leverage third-party Facebook ads reporting software to generate the report of your Facebook campaign.
You can also use the Facebook Ad Library to view all current and historical ads that a Facebook Page is running, including any deleted ads.
That’s a problem if you want to target several audiences with that ad.
Because each time you want to get to a new audience, you’ll have to create a new individual ad. So, if you make five posts with five unique IDs, your likes, comments, and shares are split by five.
That’s not effective at all.
By contrast, dark posts allow every targeted person to see all likes, comments, and shares. As such, you can build more social proof so that your potential customers are more likely to purchase your products/services.
That brings us to the next issue:
Why Are Dark Posts Useful?
Dark posts are efficient because they allow you to:
1. Target Your Audience Precisely
Facebook bases its traditional promotional posts on Facebook on generic variables:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographical location
- Interests
An unpublished post allows you to:
- Target your audience more precisely through specific keywords (e.g., a job title).
- Create uniquely tailored ads for all of your audiences and segments in a specific audience; each audience/segment sees only the ad that’s designed for them.
- Target all audience segments with those personalized ads simultaneously.
That precise targeting has a significant impact on your ROI.
2. Have more A/B Testing Options
Dark posts target different audiences, meaning you can test multiple versions of the same ad to see which one gets more:
- Clicks
- Conversions
- Engagement
Pro tip: Experiment with different ad features to optimize your dark posts (e.g., headline, action buttons, or visuals).
3. Improve Other Content
Once you know which ad features work best for a specific audience, you can implement those features in other posts. Let’s say you create a post, but you’re not sure about the image. You can publish two identical dark posts with two different photos, see which one performs better, and remove the other.
4. Prevent Spam
People hate spammy content, and numbers prove it: three out of four people think there are too many ads on social media.
Just picture your Facebook timeline swamped in boosted ads that look the same. Those ads would suffocate any trace of organic posts on your page.
As a result, your customers would deem your page useless and spammy.
By contrast, dark posts keep your timeline clear and don’t clog your followers’ news feeds. Facebook users want to see more posts from their friends, not brands’ ads.
So, avoid becoming annoying to keep your brand community loyal.
How Do You Use Dark Posts for Facebook Influencer Marketing?
Here’s how to leverage dark posts for your advantage, especially if you’re running an influencer marketing campaign.
1. More Social Proof
When people see a significant number of their peers appreciate a particular product/service/brand, they want it too. When you create dark posts, the accumulated likes, comments, and shares increase social proof. As a result:
- Your post gets more attention.
- More people will interact with it.
- Your conversion rates will skyrocket.
- Facebook algorithm deems it high-quality, so it boosts it higher.
That’s a snowball of social proof that decreases your total cost per result.
If you’re setting up an influencer marketing campaign, you can use the same influencer with slightly tweaked messages to reach more audiences. That allows better testing of different ad features at lower costs.
2. Simpler Campaigns
The more ads you have on Facebook, the harder they are to manage. And it’s not just about hard work either; it’s about how that glorious mess affects your decision-making capabilities. You may forget to shut down ads that don’t perform well or miss essential opportunities.
Dark posts streamline your campaigns so that you can have more control. Here’s how that translates in an influencer marketing campaign:
The more content creators you have working for you, the more complicated things are to manage. Facebook Dark Posts lessen your advertising efforts without compromising your campaign objectives.
3. Better Targeting
Unpublished posts allow you to target lookalike audiences and very distinct groups.
To have more success, test your influencers’ messages! Even a slight tweak in lighting or colors can give a whole new meaning to your messages.
Next, use this new information to create more appealing posts for each custom audience on all platforms. Running these micro-campaigns will get you better feedback on your audience, meaning you can craft more effective messages.
4. Get Feedback
If you’ve ever used Facebook Ads Manager, you know how difficult it is to find the right audience. However, unpublished page posts solve that issue because:
- You create unique feedback forms for beta testing.
- You share these invites just with your select audience.
- You save time and resources.
How Do You Create Dark Posts?
Creating dark posts on Facebook is a fairly straightforward process:
Go to Facebook Ads Manager. You can find this tool in the “See More” section in the left-hand side of your Facebook homepage.
- Open the Options & Setting Menu in Facebook’s Ads Manager top left corner.
- At the bottom of this menu, click on the Engage Customers section and then the Page Posts dashboard to open it.
- Click on the “Create Post” button to create your first unpublished page post.
- Select the post type you need and then add all the necessary content.
- After uploading everything, you’ll see two options to publish this post:
- An ad
- An ad for which you can schedule the publishing time
After creating the dark post on this social media platform, it will appear in your dashboard. From here on, you can choose the actions you want for this post:
- Publish
- Schedule
- Delete
- Create
- Ad
Pro tip: monitor the relevant engagement metrics.
How to Optimize Your Facebook Dark Posts
Now that you’ve created a Facebook dark post or two, let’s see how to optimize your work:
- Review A/B tests. Of course, you’ll need to set your marketing objectives first and organize that A/B testing campaign. Luckily, even companies with limited budgets can see precise results within a day. Here’s what to follow:
- Cost per engagement if your goal is to create more engagement
- Cost per click if you want to increase traffic
- Cost per conversion if you set up conversion campaigns
- Find the ad that’s performing best. Shut down the ads that cost you the most and put the remaining money towards the most efficient ad.
That’s the primary way to optimize your Facebook dark posts, but you can take things further:
- Take that most efficient ad you’ve found in the previous step and duplicate it.
- Change your audience demographics by narrowing down the interests or adding extra keywords to the mix.
- Review results; record winners and delete losers.
Pro tip: These ads will trigger engagement in the shape of comments and other reactions. Reply to all those comments to speed up your potential customers’ purchasing decisions.
Dark Posts Disadvantages
Dark posts have some drawbacks that you should learn about before setting up your campaign:
- You can’t edit them after you’ve created the ad. So, if you want to correct a spelling error, you’ll have to create a new post ID, and that loses all the social proof you’ve gathered with the old dark post.
- Tracking different campaigns and ad sets is more difficult if you hard-code UTM parameters into the link. That UTM stays with the dark post in a new campaign, which means it shows fewer leads. To solve this problem, remember to use the URL Parameters feature on Facebook to update UTM parameters throughout your campaigns.
In Conclusion
Even with these two disadvantages above, Facebook dark posts still have significantly more benefits. Employ them in your ad campaigns, and you’ll see better results at decreased costs.
Zeroing in on your audiences increases your chances of engagement and gets you more helpful feedback from your potential customers. That starts a new cycle of improved engagement and more accurate feedback.
As a result, you’ll craft even more efficient messages that sell more products.
The problem with unpublished posts is knowing which adjustments to make. That statement is true, especially in influencer marketing, where people are your messages, but not limited to it.
That’s why the best advice is to find a trustworthy marketing agency to help you implement those dark posts. Arrange a strategy call at inBeat today, and we can discuss precisely what you need!
Try inBeat.