Should You Promote Medium Blog Posts on Facebook? I Spent $20 to Find Out
Gif created by author in Canva.
As a successful blogger, one of my most frequently asked questions is how to promote a blog post on social media. And until recently, my answer was “I literally have no idea,” because I’d never done it.
Sure, I used to link recent blog posts in Facebook comments. Yes, I talk about them on Instagram. But I’d never gone through the full process of actually promoting a blog post on social media.
Well, I got pretty tired of not having a decent answer for people, so I decided it was time to find out. What does happen if you buy an ad to promote your blog post on social media? So I spent $20 on Facebook to promote a blog post, just so I’d have an answer.
My hypotheses before I started:
I would not earn my $20 back.
The bump in external traffic would have a corresponding effect on internal traffic.
Here I’ll break down exactly what I did and what the outcome was.
Method: How I set up the Facebook ad to promote my Medium post.
First, I picked out one of my recent blog posts. I chose this one because it was the most recent and because I’ve seen some other content out there along similar lines, so I had some hopes it would garner some clicks.
I went into my Facebook page account and created an ad. I selected a budget of $20 to be spent over 5 days ($4/day), with a target audience of people who were interested in psychology, based in the States, and over the age of 18.
Screenshot of my ad target audience.
I decided I would not alter the audience or anything throughout the length of the ad, because I’d heard that changes the Facebook algorithm, which I didn’t want to.
Results: The numbers from internal and external traffic sources
Before the ad, my post had 521 views, none from Facebook. After the ad, the post had received 9.1k views, 172 coming from Facebook. Of those, 169 came directly from the ad, which I know because Facebook tells me.
I don’t know how much revenue came directly from Facebook clicks, but I know I paid 12 cents per click.
Screenshot taken from Facebook ad.
I earned $4.09 for 301 views on day 1, almost all of which came from internal sources. This gives me approximately 1.25 cents/internal view.
It would be very difficult to see how much I “earned” for each Facebook click or view, especially because there’s a ton of other noise in there (like Chrome content suggestions, Twitter, Google search views, and so on). But given that I earned about 1.2 cents per internal view, where it’s highly likely the viewers is a paying member, it’s extremely unlikely that I earned my 12c per click back from the Facebook ad.
Even if I earned 1.2c per click, same as internal views, I’d still only have earned $2.06 from my Facebook ad.
Discussion & Conclusion: It’s not worth the money for traffic, but there are good insights.
As expected, it was not worth the money. Maybe if I could promote a blog post that had some kind of paid product in it, like an ebook, an affiliate link, or a course, this would be worth it.
However, for traffic, it just isn’t. I didn’t even see a corresponding internal spike in traffic as I’d expected.
There were two unexpected takeaways I got from this experiment. The first neat thing I did want to note is that I got a massive and very unusual spike of views from external sources. Below, the green bar is internal traffic, while the blue one is external.
Screenshot taken by author
I almost never get external traffic like this on a post, and the start of it coincided with the first day my ad was promoted. Did posting an ad to Facebook do this? Probably not, but it’s always possible.
Secondly, Facebook ads gave me a very good insight on impressions versus clicks. I saw that while 1868 people saw the ad, only 169 chose to click. It would be fascinating to see how that changed if I tweaked my target audience or the content I was promoting. It may be a cheap-ish way to test headline appeal if nothing else.
In conclusion, while promoting this post on social media was not lucrative, it was a fascinating experiment and it was worth the $20 just to have a conclusive answer on whether you should pay to promote your blog posts on social media. In case there’s any doubt, the answer is no, you should not.
Future research: target interests more selectively.
In future iterations of this experiment, should I ever try to promote a blog post like this again, I’d select a story that had a more conclusive takeaway or call to action, to drive additional revenue. I’d also run several experiments simultaneously to see which performed best.
While this experiment did not earn me the money I’d spent, it did give me some interesting conclusions to share with other writers.
First, unless you’re selling something on your blog post, it’s not worth it to promote it for views alone.
Second, ads do give you some key insights into your target audience and headline appeal.
Third, it’s possible that creating the ad caused an external spike of traffic from Google and other sources. This is unverified, however.
Fourth, and finally, $20 is a cheap price to pay to satisfy my curiosity on the age-old question of whether you should pay to promote your blog posts.
