Published and unpublished page posts

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Published and unpublished page posts

Another powerful feature within Power Editor is the ability to create page post advertisements without having to interact with the post interface on your actual Facebook page. Because all advertisements on Facebook are essentially are a page post, it's extremely valuable to leverage this tool from within Power Editor. Now, before we get started, let's talk about two types of page posts. There's a published page post, which essentially means that it will appear on your page timeline and will also receive organic distribution. And then there's the unpublished page post, often referred to as a dark page post.

This is strictly an advertisement. It will look exactly like a page post and function like one, however, it won't actually receive organic views or appear on your page timeline. This is extremely useful as you test different offers, creatives, and add copy. It will eliminate cluttering your page with a wide array of ads, but it also offers you the opportunity to exclude your current Facebook fans. You can experiment with a variety of ways to use published or unpublished page posts.

Let's take a closer look at how to create them. Remember, you can access Power Editor either through heading to the link below on your screen, or by selecting Power Editor at the top of your ads manager. The first way to access page posts is by selecting it from the top menu. Here we'll see a list of all our page posts from the page that we have selected. In the main window, we see all scheduled, published, and ad posts that are applicable to our ad. One thing to notice is the privacy column.

This is where you get a snapshot of what ads are private. Meaning these ones will not receive organic distribution or appear in your news feed. If I wanted to publish any private post, and for the sake of this example, I'll just select a public one. I'll choose Actions, and I can publish it right from here. I'm also able to use the Action menu to schedule the lead and create a new ad. Now when scheduling, set the date to publish the post, and once you're ready, you can choose Schedule or you can cancel out of this.

To create a new post, you can also use the Create Post option from the upper navigation. I'm gonna unselect this and select Create Post. Here Facebook is reminding you that you can create news feed eligible ads in Power Editor. We will be going over this later in the video. In this window, you can select what type of post you're looking to create, either a link, carousel, photo, video, status, or offer. And this might look a little bit different to you. Facebook is always updating these offers.

Next you'll fill in the content for your ad, and enter either an image URL or upload an image. When uploading an image, it must be from your computer. Unfortunately, there's not an option to access your image library. Next you see two radio buttons where you can select whether that post will only be used as an ad, or, the post will be published on the page. Facebook will give you some additional information indicating that the languages and location settings that you select here must also match those in your ad.

Basically what's happening is Facebook is saying you can't show an ad only to people in English on your Facebook page organically and then decide to show it to people of other languages as an ad. Both must match. So once you're ready, you can choose Create Post or cancel out of there. I also want to point out that you can view post details that include some valuable analytics by clicking directly on the ad in the list. And remember, you can also publish posts straight from the ads section in Power Editor.

Let's walk through a quick example. I'm going to head over to my Power Editor dashboard. Selecting my Ads view, I'm going to select an ad that I wish to edit. From here, I'll scroll down to the destination, ensuring that a Facebook page is attached. Here I can see H+ Sport is associated. And further down to the existing page post option. Here I can see the page post that is associated with this ad.

But I also have the option of selecting other ones. This one mentions that it's unpublished, so we know that this is a non-organic page post, or a dark page post. To add a brand new page post, select the plus icon just to the right. You'll notice this window looks very much like the post box you would find on your Facebook page. You'll go ahead and fill it in with your ad information where then you have the option of Publish. You also can schedule or backdate before you publish this post.

Now you may have noticed the Enter Post ID option under the page post list. Every ad on Facebook is assigned an id, along with every campaign, ad set, and ad. You can quickly find your post id back in your page posts view. Let's head there. Great, so here you can see the ids associated with these posts. Now one feature still missing from Power Editor is the ability to bulk create unpublished page posts. So you'll still have to manually create the page posts one by one using either one of the two options we just reviewed.

Leveraging unpublished page posts will greatly enhance your ability to craft unique advertisements while still providing high quality content on your organic timeline.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/facebook-marketing-advanced-advertising/published-and-unpublished-page-posts