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Facebook has made a lot of changes to EdgeRank over the last few months. Many marketers say those changes have led to lower-than-average reach with their posted content. This leaves a lot of businesses feeling like Facebook is taking away from the value of the audience they’ve created. In reality, those changes have improved news feed quality, making it a better system for the most engaging content to be visible.

You have the option of promoting your Facebook posts for a set cost if you want to reach more of your fans and their friends. Another tactic that is often overlooked is to amplify your content to a relevant audience outside of your social network.

Content Amplification Versus Promoted Posts
Amplifying your content on Facebook lets you reach any person based on his or her interests. With promoted posts, you will only be able to reach your fans and their friends using demographic filters.

Amplified content can benefit any brand. For example, if a salon offers $15 off any service on a daily deals site and posts it on Facebook, it will be seen by about six to 15 percent of its audience. If the salon amplifies the content, it can be seen by an even larger number of relevant users who are not currently page fans.

When you amplify your content, your target audience will see the post in their news feed rather than the sidebar ads on the right. This placement is much more effective, especially on mobile devices where the news feed items are more prominent.

Why Didn’t You Know About This?
Marketers have overlooked this feature because there have been so many other changes since the IPO. The more radical features have been getting the most attention. Facebook also hasn’t done much to promote content amplification, its functionality is hidden within Power Editor or the API.

Optimizing Content Amplification
Just like any other form of advertising, you do not want to limit your content to just a single target audience. It is important to test multiple variants to get the most valuable targeting. Try filtering by location, demographic, interests, etc. Test each target set to learn what works the best.

Who Should You Target?
To know who you should be targeting, you need to look at your campaign objectives. Use a data-led approach to identify which users will be the most likely to find your content valuable based on their interest profiles. Using insight tools and social data can help you focus in on the right targets and decrease your cost per engagement while making your content more effective.

How Much Should You Spend on Testing?
The great thing about content amplification is you can keep your budget flexible. Plan to spend about $20 per variation of each campaign so that you can get a good idea of what is working best.

When to Start
There is no reason to wait to start amplifying content. With such great benefits, it is easy to get an offer or promotion out to your target audience quickly. There will be more engagement with amplified content, so it is one of the best options.

Have you used amplified content on Facebook? What were your results? How do you target fans to increase engagement?

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Dawn Pigoni of Be Social Worldwide is a certified social marketing specialist and a social media virtual assistant. Dawn offers superb social networking, social marketing and social bookmarking to WAHMs, small business owners, Internet marketers, affiliate marketers, and coaches who desire to bring stunning Internet presence through social networking to their businesses. Get Dawn’s free report, Social Networking today and see how she can assist you with being social worldwide.