When I say “Facebook advertising”, for many the straight-forward marketplace ads you see on the right-hand side of the site come to mind for many. And, for many in the PR world, “Facebook advertising” is a dirty word. Heck, anything around “advertising” has been a historically dirty word for our profession. But that’s all changing with Facebook advertising. And, as a result, a lot of PR people are missing out.

There are many ways to use Facebook ads (and now, the new promoted posts), but I continue to believe one of the more effective ways for PR folks to use Facebook ads is to amplify your most compelling or strategically-pointed content on Facebook. What am I talking about? Let’s take a look at a few examples from a client I worked on for a couple years here in the Twin Cities called “Bike Walk Move.”

Bike Walk Move was a campaign created to increase awareness around biking and walking in specific neighborhoods in the Twin Cities. Our goal? To get more people moving via bikes and walking.

On the social side of this work, one of our strategies on Facebook was simple–use Facebook’s page post ads to amplify some of our more visually compelling content to reach a large number of people in the Twin Cities metro area.

Here was the simple four-step process we took:

1–Identify powerful/compelling visuals to build a Facebook post around

2–Write a compelling headline to drive engagement.

3–Post to Facebook and keep the post up for 3-4 hours until 5-10 likes/comments were added.

4–Create a Facebook page post ad, target it appropriately and launch 4-6 hours after the initial post ran for a three-day period.

Simple, right?

The results were outstanding (again, keep in mind this is a smaller, more localized client/organization):

* Grew our Facebook community by 1,500 percent in just eight months (in large part–almost entirely–due to the page likes generated from these page post ads)

* Posts promoted via Facebook page posts had an average of 109,000 impressions per post

* Page post ads featuring infographics averaged 68 likes, 10 comments and 16 shares (well above like/comment/share numbers for our average post)

We didn’t just use the page post ads with any old post, either. We strategically chose a number of different kinds of posts to put ad dollars behind to accomplish our goals of: 1) Building more “likes” for the page, 2) Getting more impressions among key audiences in key areas of the city we were targeting, 3) Building conversations around key topics we cared about relating to biking and walking. Here are a few examples:

Share posts to help us spread our message

Like posts to build engagement

Posts sharing links to bylined articles promoting our cause

Engagement-focused posts designed to spur discussions

Resource-based map posts (based on analytics that told us readers wanted more map info)

So, that was our approach with Bike Walk Move. I’ve since been using a similar approach with other clients and it’s working equally as well (based on different goals, of course). How are you using Facebook page post ads to amplify your client’s key content on Facebook?