Facebook Sponsored Stories Give Priority Placement on Fan Newsfeeds

Earlier this year we reported that less than 10% of your Facebook fans see your posts. Shortly before, Facebook had announced a means to by-pass this limitation — by paying to promote your posts via Facebook Sponsored Stories.

What Are Facebook Sponsored Stories Work?

Sponsored stories are types of display ads that promote social connections and actions people make with your Page, app or event. People are influenced by what their friends like and connect to. Sponsored stories are a way to get the actions of how your fans interact with your fanpage in front of that fan's friends, so that their behavior can being influencing their friends.

How Do Facebook Sponsored Stories Work?

• A fanpage admin makes a post — either a status update, photo, or link.
• The page admin can pay to have this post be a sponsored story. Prices range depending on the targeting selected.
• When someone interacts with your Page, app, or event it creates a story that their friends may see in the news feed.
• You can target who sees sponsored stories, including location, gender, age, likes and interests, relationship status, workplace and education of your target audience. You can also target your post to people who are already connected to your Facebook Page, or friends of your fan.

For example, when someone likes your Page, or posts a comment, or likes a post, they are endorsing your brand. Normally, the friends of your fan don't see when that fan likes your Page because there’s a lot of activity in their news feed already. When you create sponsored stories, you’re increasing the number of people who will learn about you through the actions of their friends.

Do Facebook Sponsored Stories Work?

We recently ran an experiment with a client on Facebook's sponsored stories. Can you guess when Sponsored Stories were turned on? The graph above speaks for itself — referral traffic from Facebook skyrocketed 780% for the three week period we turned on Sponsored Stories. During the campaign, the Facebook Sponsored Stories drove 275 new page and 2,023 actions (comments, likes, shares).

In the end, the campaign cost/visit was only $0.86; this was a bargain compared to the average cost/visit of the concurrent paid search campaign — from $3 to $7.

What's more, this much lower cost/visit resulted in better ROI throughout the entire conversion funnel. Ultimately, the cost per opportunity was half that of paid search.

Have you experimented with Facebook Sponsored Stories? What were your results?