Creative Ways to Use Facebook Dark Posts

We recently discussed the use of Facebook Dark Posts as part of your online marketing strategy in a guest post with the Studio Firm. To give you a quick refresher, or if you happened to miss that particular article (which you can find by clicking here), a Facebook Dark Post is a post that you don’t actually publish. Instead, you save it in the site’s Power Editor, then promote it toward a specific audience that’s been pre-determined.

While this may seem strange to some business types who are accustomed to much more overt types of advertising, this allows for added flexibility and unique strategy opportunities. We touched on some of these opportunities in the previous post, but have now taken the time to collect a few awesome ways that you can use Facebook Dark Posts to gain attention for your business:

Strategy #1: Geotargeting

This is one of the most common and effective uses of Facebook Dark Posts. Let’s say that you are the owner of a small family diner. You get good business, but better-known chains such as Denny’s and IHOP are always trumping you. What you can do is create a Dark Post with the use of Facebook’s location filter to target everyone within a specified radius of your store. Plus, you can target residents and visitors who are interested in one of those larger chains. Once they learn about you, they might be willing to give you a try.

Strategy #2: Niche Targeting

This strategy allows you to target very specific individuals by focusing on their interests within their interests (or niche within a niche, if you prefer). To illustrate, we’ll use a scenario where you write a blog that focuses on writing novels. This opens you up to a whole world of interests. So you create a series of eBooks that focus on the specifics of several genres — action writing, romantic writing, comedic writing, etc. To garner attention to these niche genres, you can create a Facebook Dark Post for each one and target your audience by searching through the site’s incredible number of pages focused on each of these interests.

Strategy #3: Bring Value

Most people don’t like to be sold to in an in-your-face kind of way. Instead, they enjoy being courted, for lack of a better term. A great strategy is to promote content that actually doesn’t advertise anything as a way to grab a person’s attention and allow them to see you as a business that provides value and not just advertising. You can do this by taking your most popular blog post and using a link to it in a Facebook Dark Post. This will draw in leads to your blog and inch them toward becoming paying customers either now or in the future when you have something more of value to offer them.

Strategy #4: Host a Secret Contest

Everyone wants to think of themselves as part of an elite, whether it’s a special club or simply a group of close friends. What if you were given the opportunity to partake in a secret contest that few people knew existed? You’d be pretty psyched, right? Well, with the use of Facebook Dark Posts, you can give your potential customers that fuzzy feeling inside. What you want to do here is target people who are not already fans of your Facebook page. Create a contest and get a conversation going based on whatever the contest is about. The goal here is NOT to push for likes, as that technique is frowned upon by Facebook. Instead, ask people to respond with the best answer to a question or something similar. Make them compete against each other and award the winner. You’re likely to connect not only with the winner but all those who participated as well.

These are only a few ways that you can use Facebook Dark Posts to your advantage. Even though creating a post that you never publish may sound counterintuitive, the truth is that this strategy can promote your business in ways that you may not have considered before.