Promoting your dental practice’s Facebook posts is one of the best ways to get your social media content in front of the people most likely to engage with it—patients, fans, and their friends and family. Facebook recently made some slight changes to how promoting, or boosting, an ad works, so here’s what you need to know to continue getting the most bang for your advertising buck.
The 20 Percent Rule Gone? Not Quite.
Facebook has always preferred little to no text on images attached to promoted posts. They look cleaner and blend in better with a user’s regular Facebook feed. In fact, until recently, Facebook would outright reject any application to promote a post whose image was more than 20 percent covered in text. In an effort to make creating ads easier, Facebook has made a couple updates to their ad image policy you need to know:
First, posts you wish to promote that have images more than 20 percent covered in text will now be accepted. Good news, right?
Well, the second change is that these posts will now be put into one of four categories, and penalized depending on how text-heavy the image is. These categories are OK, Low, Medium, and High.
Images categorized as OK—below 20 percent text—should remain unaffected. In the Low range, meaning the ad image contains around 20 percent text, according to Facebook “may be slightly limited in their reach” and cost slightly more per impression. Posts ranked Medium or High will cost significantly more per impression, and will be severely limited in exposure, perhaps not even reaching any of your target audience.
Make Facebook Ad Images That They Will Accept
How can you create ads with images that are light on text and suitable for boosting? Just follow these simple tips:
- Limit text on the image by putting most of it in the post’s text box.
- Reduce font size and concentrate text in one portion of the image.
- Use Facebook’s Image Text Check Tool to see ahead of time which category your image will be placed in.
Of course, any content you receive from My Social Practice will be in the OK range and suitable for boosting. Ideas for promotional offers, practice videos, and Like Challenges you get from us are prime candidates that are highly effective when boosted.
So if you’ve never promoted a post, we invite you to discover the amazing ways it enhances your reach with fans and target audiences. Even a small investment in the right piece of content can yield big dividends in the form of patient retention, new patient acquisition, and top-of-mind awareness.
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About the Author: Jack Hadley is a dental marketing expert and one of the founding members of My Social Practice. My Social Practice is a digital dental marketing company located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Jack is passionate about helping dental practices grow. If you’d like to book Jack or one of the other members of My Social Practice’s speaking team, you can do that HERE. Interested in learning more about the benefits of SEO for dentists, our dental websites service? Learn More Here.
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