Learning how to boost a Facebook post could also boost your business.
More and more small businesses are taking advantage of social media sites, particularly Facebook, to reach out directly to their target audience. However, as anyone that uses the social media platform knows, it is easy for a post to rapidly slip down a feed until it seems to be lost forever.
As a business, you don’t want your posts sliding down those feeds and ending up somewhere that no one will scroll through. The good news is that there are ways to boost or bump a Facebook post to bring it back up to the top and keep everyone interacting and talking about the post.
Why Do It?
There have been a lot of changes in the way that Facebook handles Facebook posts, particularly business posts. When a great post on your account is no longer getting any attention, boosting it can be an option to draw more eyes to your online presence without having to create who paid Ad campaign.
Boosting the Facebook post is as simple as logging onto your business account, choosing the post you want to boost and clicking the boost post blue box in the bottom right-hand corner.
Next, choose the target audience you want to reach with your Facebook post. You will be able to choose from options by clicking on your preferences or by editing the selection criteria to focus on gender, age, location or even by interests based on Facebook post activity. You only get a few simple options so it makes it super easy for a beginner without having to learn Facebook Advertising (which is it’s own beast).
1 – You’ll notice it asks if you want Desktop, Mobile and/or Instagram
2 – It will ask you to choose your Audience
a) People you choose through targeting (so gender/ age/ location and a few other options)
b) People that like your page (and you can narrow it down by location aswell)
c) People who like your page AND their friends (I really like this one – as typically if someone is interested or follows you – their friends are also like minded – so would be more likely to be your target audience).
d) Small business or home business in a specific income range
e) Pick an influencer where THEIR followers would be your marketing avatar (not sure why it has Brendon’s name come up wrong but that’s what defaulted)
Or if you are feeling bold create a NEW audience.
3 – State a budget and time frame – so for example $35 over 3 days. And of course a payment method.
4 – You can even ad the Facebook Pixel in your landing page or webpage on what you are promoting for more reporting and analytics.
Can Any Post Be Boosted?
Facebook actually has some rules about the types of posts that can receive a boost. There is a rule about photos in the post that needs to be checked before considering a specific post. There has to be less than 20% text with any image to be able to boost.
This is an important consideration when you are originally designing a post. Limit the text to no more than 20% of the entire post, so it is easy to boost as needed at a later time.
What Not to Do
You do have to pay to boost a post on Facebook. This needs to be considered if you are thinking about boosting a post that brought comments and followers but if it is not your original content and links to another site. In some ways, this is just providing free advertising for another business, which doesn’t result in any benefit other that general interest.
Make sure any posts that you boost on Facebook include a way to link to your website. You cannot edit or change the original, so make your choices wisely to maximize exposure for your business.
Pretty easy right?
Remember – you can boost posts for different reasons. For lead generation on a report or webinar or even just boosting reach and engagement.
Case Study:
We boosted an engagement post for a client recently. We targeted a specific city and geo area for a 10 mile radius (it is a bricks and mortar business). Ad spend for each was $30. Ads ran 3 days. It was a fun post of dogs and for people to guess the dog breed.
It obtained a reach of 1,612 people. 218 people engaged in this post with likes, shares and comments. Cost per post ran .14 per. The page likes jumped too during that period. It also gained him connections with local vets (great partnerships and potential for expanded reach there too).
So all in all for $30 it was a huge success!
If you liked this article, see this related article: Being Brand Consistent On Your Social Media
