Publishing Your Unpublished (Dark) Posts on Facebook

If you’re running ads on Facebook, you probably already know what a unpublished (dark) post is. Just in case you don’t know, it’s a post that is used to promote your message to people without being on your Facebook page. I wrote an article on the HostGator blog if you need more detail on what a dark post is and how to create it.

Dark posts are great because you can do many different things with them. One example is that you can run different ads to test how a message will perform in front of an audience. But after you’ve found the winning message, what do you do now? Recreate the post and press Publish?

Sure – you can do that. But then you lose the value of the ads you paid for, the social proof. All of the likes, comments, and shares are now gone because it’s a new post.

With this post, I’m going to show you how you can publish your post live to your page so that it can begin earning organic reach. Since it already has social proof from the paid reach, it will publish to the page with the same reach and hopefully gather more engagement.
Please watch this video for more details. If you are unable to watch the video, I’ve included the steps below.

Step 1 – In your ad manager, click the hamburger on the top left of the page.

Step 2 – Hover over “All Tools” and then select the Page Posts option. This will show you all of your dark posts by default. If you need to, you can change your page on the top left.

Step 3 – Select the post you wish to publish. You can use their search feature to help identify your post.

Step 4 – Next to the search feature is the Actions drop down. Click that and select Publish. This will publish the post live to your page.

I hope you found this tip to be helpful. If you have any questions about these steps, or what you can do in Facebook in general, please leave a comment and we will be happy to give you more details.