When it comes to Facebook, not all social media promotion techniques are created equal

97% of newsrooms use social platforms to share their promotions and branded content (LMA, 2019.) Assuming you’re one of the 97%, are you optimizing social to work the best for your promotions and your brand?

Social media is a cultural force and an excellent distribution channel for local media companies to promote content. It’s fantastic for email acquisition, information generation, and engagement across multiple platforms. But, not all promotion techniques are created equal.

The team at Social News Desk joined us at the Second Street Summit to dive into the different promotion techniques you can use in your social media strategy. They even helped KPRC deliver a 110% increase in post effectiveness!

Here are three specific ways you can leverage social media to make your promotions more successful!

Create Highly Shareable Social Media Content

When creating content for social media, it’s important to remember to make it shareable. Ensure your content makes a difference to your audience members when you provide them with something to win, a cause to support, or celebrating community members.

One perfect solution to this is promotions! Contests and interactive content – such as quizzes, photo contests, and sweepstakes – are optimized for social. The viral nature of these promotions are always great for audience engagement. You can incentivize users with extra chances the more people a person gets to enter.

It Pays to Use Paid Posts

Not all social media promotion techniques are created equal. There are really two buckets when it comes to promoting: organic social posts and paid social posts.

Organic Social Posts – This is when you create a post and publish it to your Facebook page. The post is sent into the feeds of those who follow/like your page, and the algorithm decides who it shows it to and when. Organic Social Posts limit your creative options such as graphic sizes and also do not allow you to target your audience.

Paid Social Posts – This is when you create a paid post which the algorithm then sends into the news feeds of those you choose through targeting. Paid Social Posts offer advanced targeting, A/B testing, automated forms, the ability to promote across platforms, and overall better optimization.

Both Organic Social Posts and Paid Social Posts have their list of benefits when used correctly. Facebook doesn’t love promotional-type content to come out organically. At a high level, the team at Facebook considers your news feed to be an extension of your newsroom. When you try to mix in content that doesn’t fit, you can end up hurting the overall reach potential for that page and that page’s content.