Glad to see you realize that there's no win if you're trying to be Don Quixote tilting against the great Facebook windmill. Well, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but now that Facebook shows us view stats, it's really fascinating - and distressing - to see what a low percentage of fans actually see a posting, typically in the order of 10-20% total. So if you have 500 fans, that means maybe 75 or so are actually seeing what you post.

That's okay, though, because Facebook has a solution: pay a few bucks and you can promote your posting, giving it more reach and visibility within your fan base. Want to go beyond that? You'd be looking at an advertisement and that's a different kettle of fish.

Let's stay focused on how you can promote your regular postings, however. As I hope you already know -- and have "liked"! -- I have a fan page on Facebook called The Ask Dave Taylor Fan Page and I use it for all sorts of tests and experiments, as well as to keep those of y'all on Facebook updated on what's going on. To test out promoting a post, I did just that.

I was posting a photo and at the bottom, adjacent to the "Post" button and the access link (it says "Public" here) was:

There's that tricky little feature. A click and it shows a price and projected added reach:

Remember, I have almost 3300 fans on the Facebook page (thank you all very much!!) so $5.00 is only going to reach about 35% or so. But it turns out that's a menu of its own. Click on the triangle adjacent to the proposed cost and there are more options:

Ah, for $10 it'll promise me 50%-100% coverage of my fans. What's cool is it turns out that Facebook only charges you for the eyeballs it can deliver, as you'll see. Here I'll opt for the full $10 fee and proceed double check payment options...

Nah, I'll stick with PayPal. It's perfect for this sort of thing.

I'm dropped back to the original posting and now it shows me the promoted fee:

A click on "Post" and the posting is up! At the bottom, a snippet of info (though I'm pretty sure only I as a page admin can see it):

Since it's poised to be promoted, a click on the link and it'll show me my stats:

The most interesting thing to notice is that there's a timer on this -- Facebook is going to give it approximately 24 hours to try and get this post in front of as many people as possible. If not everyone checks their Facebook by then, well, some won't be counted.

In fact, the next day, the results are real, not projected:

You can see that the final bill was $9.37 for an added 970 people seeing the posting. That works out, in case you're curious, to 0.96 cents/person or $9.66 CPM, which is rather high given that they've already opted in to be fans of the page. Ah well, now you know.

If you do use the promote feature on your own Facebook fan page, post your stats. Let's try to see how the figures vary based on total number of fans, etc.