To promote an object maintained by a social networking system, an advertiser identifies the object to the social networking system. Based on the user interaction with one or more posts associated with the object, the social networking system selects one or more candidate posts from the one or more posts. Promotion efficacies of each candidate post for a group of users having one or more common demographic characteristics are determined and a candidate post is selected based at least in part on the promotion efficacies. The selected candidate post may be identified to the advertiser or presented to additional users having the common demographic characteristic by the social networking system.