Facebook promoted posts experiment

You may have noticed that Facebook is now giving you the option to promote your posts when you add them.  They claim that by doing this more of your page fans will see you posts.  They have recently added stats to the bottom of each post to show you what percentage of your fan base actually gets to see you post for instance this image below was seen by 630 people, which is 27% of my fan base.

You've probably seen lots of panicy Facebook statuses lately from people stressing that only a small percentage of people are seeing their posts since this was introduced and that it's all a con to make you pay to promote your posts.   However, people are forgetting that it has been like this for a long time, Facebook use an algorithm known as Edge Rank to decide which stories are shown to which people in their news feed.  So the truth is that not all of your fans have been seeing all of your posts for a long time, but the introduction of the new stats on each post is just making this a lot more clear!

So back to the promoted posts, do they make a difference?  We all have certain things we post that we really want everyone to see so is it worth paying to make sure that happens?  I thought I would run a little experiment.  I have a design competition running called Dress Factor, and the deadline for entry is end of this month so I decided to post a picture of the Janome MC5900 sewing machine that you could win along with a link to enter and pay for it as a promoted post.  I want to remind people that they've only got a few weeks to get their entries in so decided it would be worth paying to promote it.

I was given twochoices for promotion, along with 2 prices.  £4 which they said they couldn't estimate the reach for, or £7 which they said would reach 2,200 people (I have 2247 fans) so almost everyone that 'likes' my page.  I opted for the £7 option. The £4 one seems a bit pointless to me if they can't give you an idea of how many people that will reach.  Maybe it works better for pages with a larger fan base.

I then a few hours later added the picture below that I knew would be very popular, lots of scrummy fabrics from Frumble.  Who could resist taking a peek at these?

It says the promoted post will be promoted for 3 days so I will come back to you with the results of the experiment.  So far even though the fabrics have been on for less time they have reached 518 people whereas the Dress Factor post has reached 483 so not really worth the money at the minute - but whether it will reach more people over time remains to be see.

What do you think about promoted posts?  Will you be trying them?  Or do you think it's wrong for Facebook to be charging you to reach the people who have already 'liked' your page?  How many more people would you want a post to be reaching for it to be worth the money?  What percentage of your fans are your posts reaching?