Promoting posts on Pages you don’t admin



I suppose that everyone knows that, as a Facebook Page admin, you can promote your Page posts by Facebook advertising to reach more Facebook users. What I didn’t know was that you can promote posts from Pages you don’t admin. It’s easy, it could be helpful, but there’s a possibility of misuse.




How did I figure it out?


Last week, a friend of mine told me that one post on his Facebook Page has more likes and comments than usual. Then we discovered, in Page Insights, that this post was promoted and has pretty high Paid Reach. But he was absolutely sure he did not pay for any ads on Facebook. And a quick look at his Ad account confirmed this.

He asked me if it’s possible to promote Page posts on Facebook if you’re not an admin of a Page which posted the post and I was pretty sure that this possibility doesn’t exist. So how the hell is it possible that his Page post is promoted? I asked several colleagues from social media marketing business and they all have the same answer as me: “Probably another admin allowed somebody to access his Ad account.” But when we checked their Ad accounts there was no promotion paid.

We were lost. I tried everything in Facebook Power Editor to figure it out, with no result. And then I asked Adam Zbiejczuk from RoiHunter. And he answered: “Just put the link to this post in Facebook Ads Manager when you choose Page Post Engagement.” I felt like a fool. I supposed that this kind of hack would be available only in Power Editor because it’s an advanced tool for Facebook ads. And it was in the basic Ads Manager.

So you can promote posts from other Pages simply by putting the link to the URL field when you choose the Page Post Engagement Ad in Facebook Ads Manager.

Just enter the post link into the url field

Facebook will alert you that you are not an admin of this Page. You obviously can’t target the fans of the Page when you’re not an admin, but you have all the other options you’re used to.

And it seems that it’s not a bug as I presumed at first. Facebook evidently knows that this is possible. They show you a prepared alert and allow you to directly message admins and request them to add you to the list of admins.

You can directly request admins of a Page to add you to the list of admins

Another interesting attribute is that by promoting the post of another Page, you disable the option to edit this post. So if there’s a mistake in the post and you promote it, the only way to correct it is to delete the post and post it again.

The option to promote posts of Pages you don’t admin is, of course, good for some cooperation between Pages and for taking the advantage of partnerships. But it could be easily misused. You can cunningly target posts of your competitors to the wrong audience and cause them communication crisis.

I don’t think that Facebook will cut this option but they should add some possibility to reject promotion when you are an admin.

If you knew about this option, sorry for this article, but I did not find any bigger article about this topic.