Facebook Posts are posts made to your timeline, business page or Facebook Group. Depending on the setting, the Facebook post is then viewable by your friends, the people who have liked and are following your Facebook Page or members of a Facebook Group.

Once a post is posted, it then becomes shareable via a share button located below the post itself. You can share a post with your friends, to a Facebook Page you manage or a Facebook Group you belong to (in some cases).

In the case of Facebook pages, you have an additional option of boosting your post. Boosting is paying Facebook to appear on a target audiences Facebook feed as a Sponsored Post. That audience can be highly localized and accurately targeted to specific people.

When you post to your personal Facebook account, your Facebook friends see it on their timeline. So your friends will see it, and anytime one of your friends like or share it the post shows on their friend’s pages. The number of people who see or have the post show on their Facebook feed is the first reach and is typically your number of friends.

When you share the post to a Facebook group, all the members of the group will see the post. The reach of these posts is typically the number of group members.

Finally, Facebook Pages

When you share or post it to a Facebook Page that you own or manage Facebook will track the reach and keep track of people clicking on images, liking, commenting and a bunch of other useful tidbits like age, location and sex. A Facebook event is similar to a page although the standard practice is to have a Facebook Page and then create events from there; that’s another article.

Facebook pages can be for individuals, businesses, organisations, clubs and even individual events (a page best serves large yearly events). Facebook Pages are free to, and you only need a personal Facebook account. Due to all the settings and picture/graphics limitations, the art of making a Facebook Page presentable can be difficult for most.

Creating a Facebook Page is step one to promote your community, organisation or event. From there you can share it with your friends, to Facebook Groups you belong to and even pay to have Facebook share it as a Sponsored post. The great thing about sharing from a Facebook Page is that the people who see your post is recorded as well as who has interactions with it (liking, sharing, commenting, etc.) and that is incredibly valuable information to know.

Before sharing a post to a Facebook Group make sure it’s allowed. Most groups have limitations on what is allowed to be shared/posted and not following those rules can get you booted out of a group.

An example of a community type post

Say there is a craft sale going on in your town and you want to get the word out. This craft sale is a smaller event so no need for a Facebook Page, however, we can create a Facebook Event with just a personal account.

From there you can make a post detailing the event, location time, a little detail as a post. You can then share that post to your friends, Groups you belong to and any Facebook Pages you manage. In this case, we share it with the local Facebook groups. One has 2800 members; one has 23000, another has 1000. This makes your post accessible to a potential of 26,800 people.

In this case post timing, the quality of the post, the rate of others posting to the group and a few other things will result in an actual reach. That 23000 member group is bustling so although lots of people will potentially see it, the post will be buried under other posts very quickly and will need to be reposted or commented on to achieve ongoing views.
The 1000 member group, on the other hand, is not very busy and your post will not be buried quickly leaving it exposed to more people.

This type of promoting is free other than maybe paying to have the graphics/post designed by a specialist and can be done by anyone.