How Facebook Dark Posts Can Boost the Effectiveness of Your Paid Ads

Organic reach on Facebook has been dropping. 

In 2014, Social@Ogilvy released a much-cited report on Facebook: Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach

Between October 2013 and February 2014, organic reach on Facebook dropped to around 6% on all pages. 

The reality is, no matter how much free content and features Facebook offers, it is a business and it needs to make money. Hence their increased emphasis on paid content. 

This presents marketers with two important issues to solve: 

• How do I reach my Facebook page fanbase effectively without relying solely on organic reach?  
• How do I use paid advertising effectively without burning a hole in my pocket? 

Introducing; Facebook Dark posts. 

What are Facebook Dark Posts? 

Dark posts (also known as unpublished posts) allow you to promote posts to specific fans on your page. 

Take a look at how Facebook Dark posts compare with standard advertising on Facebook.  

Marketing agency Growth Pilots ran dark post experiments against standard Facebook ads and has consistently seen better results from Facebook Dark Posts. The table below show the results from three different accounts.

Source: Growth Pilots

Notes: CTR: Click-thru Rate, CVR: Conversion Rate, CPC: Cost Per Click, CPA: Cost Per Acquisition

Why You Should Be Using Facebook Dark Posts  

Facebook Dark posts do not show up on your page’s timeline like normal Facebook posts do. This allows you to do some hyper-selective targeting not available to ordinary Facebook ads. With dark posts, you can do all these without crowding your business page with multiple public posts: 

How to Use Facebook Dark Posts (The Technical Know-How)

Facebook has compiled a comprehensive guide on how to set up Facebook Dark Posts on the Power Editor. You can view their guide here

Here are some suggestions on how you can use Facebook Dark posts to empower your marketing campaigns on Facebook. 

• Create several variations of an ad to target different audience attributes and characteristics 

• Test the same ad on different audience segments, segmenting by interests

• Promote specific products to targeted segments 

• Associate multiple images with a single promotional campaign 


Now that we’ve shed some light on Facebook dark posts, why not test them out in your next campaign?